Page 17

I don’t have a plan. I have the truth and a voice I’ve spent my whole life keeping shut. For once, I’m going to say it in the language she trusts. Out loud.

“Nikki.”

It comes out of me loud enough that the whole strip turns. A stroller stops. Two merchants step out from their doorways. She looks up from the kettle, and the cup goes still in her hand, and her face goes shuts down, every bit of the morning’s brightness packed away behind it. I earned that.

I walk down the middle of Prospect Street toward her stand in my spikes, and I make myself keep talking, out loud, in front of every last one of them.

“I’m no good at this.” My voice carries. People are watching and I let them. “Ask anyone. I don’t say things. I stack wood and I fix kettles and I clear trees and I let all of it do the talking, because a long time ago a man in my family taught me words are worth nothing, so I quit using them.” I stop at her counter. She’s staring at me, cup frozen, cheeks gone pink. “I stacked you a cord this morning before the sun came up. Off your own tree. And I drove away thinking that told you everything. I was wrong, and I’ve been wrong the whole two hours it took me to get back here.”

“You’re supposed to be at the regional,” she says.

Her voice is barely above a whisper. It’s still turned down, and I can’t stand it.

“I forfeited,” I say, and somebody in the crowd makes a noise. “I gave up the title to come stand in the middle of this street and say this out loud. You needed it out loud, but I handed you a woodpile instead and let you think you were something I stopped at on the way to my real life.” I grip her plank counter. “You’re not the stop, Nikki. You’re the reason I couldn’t feel an axe in my hands this morning. You’re the whole valley to me, and I drove two hours in my competition gear to say it where you and everybody in this town can hear it. I’m in love with you. Out loud. Loud as you want it.”

Her eyes fill. The cup finally lands on the counter with a small sound.

“You left me a woodpile,” she says, and her voice cracks in the middle.

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll never once leave without saying it again.” I come around the counter, into her little kingdom, and I take her cold hands in both of mine right there where the whole strip can watch. “Say it back or don’t. Yell at me or don’t. But turn yourself back up first. I didn’t drive two hours for the quiet version of you. I came the whole way for the loud version. Where’d she go? Bring her back.”

And there she is.

Her whole face breaks open, bright, the volume slamming back on all at once. She grabs a fistful of my bib and hauls me down and says, loudly, so the entire strip hears every word of it, “You are the most infuriating, wonderful, backwards man I have ever met, and I have been in love with you since you told a dead tree where to fall.”

Somebody claps. Then the whole strip does. A stranger whistles. Nikki laughs into my mouth as I kiss her, both her hands in my sweaty hair, cider steam and cold air and two hundred people I’ll never see again cheering a man who finally learned to say the loud thing.

Later, after close, the strip’s gone amber and quiet and it’s just us. She’s up on the wood step I built her, cider cooling in two cups, and I’m on the gravel with my back against her counter and her knee against my shoulder, still in my ruined bib because I never went home to change.

“You gave up your title,” she says. Not the first time she’s said it.

“I have two. I don’t need the third.”

“You drove two hours in spiked boots to yell at me in front of a busload of leaf-peepers.”

“I’d do it again tomorrow.” I tip my head back against the plank to look up at her. “I mean that. Any morning you wake up unsure, I’ll stand in this street and say it as loud as you need till you’re sure.”

She goes quiet. A good quiet, the kind we’re both learning to rest in.

“I read the wood wrong this morning,” she says softly. “I’ve spent my whole life reading the quiet wrong. Turns out a quiet man can mean the loudest thing there is.”

“This one does.” I find her hand and lace my fingers through hers. “Every word I never said. All of it was this.”

She smiles down at me under the string lights, warm and bright and exactly as much as she is.

“Then keep saying it,” she says. “Out loud. I’ll be right here, running my very serious pumpkin business.”

“Weekend,” I tell her, and she laughs, because she knows now. It was always going to mean I’ll be back.

EPILOGUE

NIKKI: 5 YEARS LATER

Five years, and I still flip the sign to CLOSED with the same little thrill I had the first day. Except now the sign hangs on an actual door.

That’s the part that gets me, every evening at close. There’s a door. There are walls—chinked log and river stone—a real roof over a real hearth where the copper kettle lives year-round now instead of six weeks in fall.

Punkin’s isn’t a canvas canopy staked into gravel anymore. It’s a building on Prospect Street with my name on the deed and Wade’s hands in every beam of it. When the lot came up for sale the winter after we married, he bought it before I’d finished saying I wanted it, and then he built the place himself over one long mountain spring, log by log, and called it nothing. Called it a project.