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What he does is stop. Half turn. Then he looks at me over his shoulder one beat too long.

“After,” he says.

My face goes warm before I understand why. It’s one word. After. It has no business doing anything to me, and it does something anyway. I grab pumpkins two at a time and haul them clear with an enthusiasm I don’t feel.

By nine, my stack is safe and the young guys are up in the pine on ropes, taking the top out in chunks, calling numbers I don’t understand back and forth. Wade stays on the ground, running lines, watching all of it, saying almost none of it. A tip of his chin, a flat hand, and someone forty feet up shifts his cut. Nobody argues. Nobody rushes to fill the quiet. They trust that he sees it.

Must be nice, I think, wiping a counter that’s already clean. To be the kind of quiet people lean toward instead of the kind of loud they lean back from.

“You have the district contract, right?” I ask the nearest young guy when he comes down for water. “The fire stuff?”

“Hazard trees, defensible space, the works.” He wipes his face with his shirt. “Half the dead pines on this strip are flagged. Dry as it’s been, everybody wants theirs gone before the season really gets going.” He nods at Wade. “He’s who the district calls. Doesn’t say much. Best in the valley.”

Best in the valley. I look at Wade—at the copper beard and the mouth that’s spent maybe nine words on me—and I decide I don’t care what he’s best at.

I bring the cider over at the first break anyway, because I said I would, and because I want to see his face when it hits.

I hold the mug out. He pulls off one glove, reaches, and his fingers close over mine on the ceramic instead of under it. Contact. A jolt goes up my wrist and scatters everywhere it shouldn’t, and I lose the sentence I had loaded and ready.

Neither of us lets go of the mug.

“You pressed this yourself,” he says. Low. Not a question.

“Told you. People weep.”

He drinks. His eyes stay on me over the rim, steady, unreadable, and I get the sudden ridiculous sense of being looked at by someone who is actually looking. At me. Not past me. He hands the mug back. Our fingers cross again on the ceramic. I let them.

“It’s good,” he says.

Two words, from the man who runs a whole crew with his chin. I decide not to poke at why those words affect me as much as they do.

“There’s a full menu Thursday.” I back toward my counter, because I need a solid object between us. “You should come see it finished. When it’s the coziest forty square feet in the—” I wave at the lights, the gold on the ridge. “You know. When it’s done.”

He looks at me. Then at the pine, half of it still standing against the sky. Then back at me.

“We’re here tomorrow too,” he says. “Ground’s soft. Doing it right takes two days.”

He pulls his glove back on and walks off toward the ropes, and I stand there holding a warm, empty mug and a fact I didn’t know I’d been waiting for.

Two days.

2

WADE

Igo up the dead pine myself, strapped in forty feet off the ground, because it’s leaning toward the ditch and the wood’s gone soft on that side.

Soft wood is how a tree fools you. I don’t let my guys near a tree that might fool them.

It’s slow work, and slow is the point. Cut a limb, let it drop clean into the patch of gravel Deacon’s roped off below, wait for his all-clear, do the next one. Careful is the only speed that keeps everybody’s hands attached. Most people think this job is a strong back and a loud saw. It isn’t. It’s knowing where a dead thing wants to fall, and where it’ll fall instead if you get cocky.

I read this pine fine. It’s the woman under it I can’t figure out.

She hasn’t stopped moving since seven. Hauling, stacking, talking—to her pumpkins, to the two vendors setting up across the strip, to nobody. From up here I can’t make out the exact words—it’s a bright run of sound that fills every gap the morning gives it. An hour ago she put a mug in my hand and her fingers crossed mine on the ceramic and something in me went quiet that’s never quiet. I’ve been thinking about it since. That’s a problem I’ll deal with on my own time.

She’s not the kind of woman a man like me gets to keep looking at. I know that going in.

I clear the last of the crown, come down the trunk, unhook. Deacon tosses me water. Rye’s feeding brush into the chipper, and the whole lot smells of pine pitch and two-stroke and, under it, cider.