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I ladle cider. I make change. I keep my voice down.

A woman my mother’s age takes her cup, looks at my face a beat too long, and says, kind, “You doing all right, honey? You look like you’ve had a morning.”

“Best morning of the season,” I tell her, bright, contained, the exact right amount. “Opening day. Enjoy the color.”

She goes. I turn to the kettle, and I feed it another split of his wood. I don’t cry into forty gallons of cider on the first day of my season.

I’ve got this. I’ve always had this. You learn young how to run a good, warm business out of the front of you while the back of you is quietly shattering.

10

WADE

Iwin the springboard chop and feel nothing.

The crowd’s up on its feet. The announcer’s saying my name and the word defending. And I’m standing on a cut plank six feet off the ground with an axe in my hand and my time on the board, and it lands on me flat. Sawdust in my teeth. Sweat down my back. The best in the valley, right on schedule, and hollow all the way through.

I come down. Deacon hands me water. I drink it and look down the valley, north, toward a strip two hours away, where a woman’s opening a pumpkin stand alone this morning. The thin wrong note that started at the second switchback before dawn hasn’t quit. It’s louder now.

I still don’t have a name for it.

“Hot saw’s in twenty,” Deacon says. “Then finals. You have this locked if you don’t fall on your face.”

“Yeah.”

He looks at me. Six years in my passenger seat, and he reads me quicker than I’d like. “No. Not yeah. You chopped that board like you were mad at it, and you haven’t cracked your face since we got here. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. Head’s not in it.”

“Head’s three streets back from Prospect.” He doesn’t say it cruelly. “You rolled into the grounds this morning with pine dust on you and your head somewhere else. You went and stacked her wood before dawn and left without a word, didn’t you?”

“It says what I—” I stop. “The wood says it.”

“The wood.” Deacon sets the water down. “Wade. I love you, so hear me. You do this. You’ve done it as long as I’ve known you. Something matters, really matters, and you go dead quiet and let the quiet stand in for you, and then you’re shocked when people read the quiet as he doesn’t care. You did it when your dad died and you wouldn’t say a word at the service and half this town thought you were cold. You did it with every woman who ever gave you a season before she gave up. You’re doing it right now, with the first one I’ve ever seen put a real look on your face, and I’m telling you—” he taps my chest with two fingers, hard “—the quiet is going to say the exact opposite of what you mean. She’s going to believe it, because that’s what quiet does. It lets people write the worst ending themselves.”

The wrong note goes off all at once, full and clear, and I finally know what it is.

It’s her at the fire, when she said, The people worth being seen by tend to be the ones backing away. It’s a woman who wakes up, reaches across town, and finds a cold spot and a woodpile.

I gave her the one thing my hands know how to do and I called it a message, and to her it’s not going to read as I’ll be back. It’s going to read as gone. I built her the shape of the thing she’s most afraid of and drove away proud of it.

The acts were never going to be enough. Not this time. Not for her. She needed the words, out loud—the cheap free easy thing I’ve spent twenty years refusing to trust—and I withheld them.

I hand Deacon my axe. “Scratch me from finals.”

His face splits into something between alarm and delight. “You’re the two-time defending⁠—”

“Scratch me. Tell Matt I forfeit.” I’m already moving, spiked boots eating the ground toward the truck, still in my bib, sawdust to the elbows, sweat not even dry. “Tell him I found something I’m not willing to lose over a trophy.”

“Wade.” Deacon’s grinning full now, jogging after me. “It’s a two-hour drive.”

“Then I better go.”

I drive it in ninety minutes. I don’t remember most of it. I come up the valley with the aspens going gold on both sides and the sun swung over to afternoon. I hit Prospect Street doing things to my transmission I’ll pay for later. I park the truck crooked at the top of the strip and get out in my competition bib with a number pinned to my chest and spikes on my boots. I don’t care who’s looking.

Plenty are looking. Opening day, leaf-season Thursday, the strip thick with tourists and strollers and cider cups. The shops are all open, and at the far end under a white canopy staked down tight, there she is.

Turned down. That’s the first thing I see, and it stops me cold in the middle of the street. My loud girl, my too-much girl, ladling cider and making change with the volume all the way off. Contained. Pleasant. Small. Somebody filed the edges off her overnight, and it was me. I did that with a stack of wood. The sight of her dimmed like that does more damage to me than any words could.