Page 7

“Regional’s really tomorrow,” Nikki says, quieter now, just to me. “Everybody keeps saying it, and I keep hoping I heard it wrong.”

“Tomorrow.” The word comes out flat, and I don’t like the taste of it, which is new. “Dawn.”

“And you’re the guy to beat.” She tips her head. “Two-time defending, Deacon said. You didn’t mention that. You’ve mentioned wood-drying times and ditch angles and exactly nothing about being valley-famous.”

“Not much to say about it.”

“You keep telling me that. I keep finding out it isn’t true.” She looks at me another second, then shakes it off, all motion again. “Okay. Go grind your stump. I’ve got a kettle to light and a propane tank I’m scared of, and if I set myself on fire before Thursday you’ll have wasted a perfectly good rescue.”

I grind the stump. It takes twenty minutes to take it down below the gravel, and while the grinder does its work, I look at the corner it leaves behind—raw dirt, chewed roots, a bare ugly patch in the back of her stand where the tree stood for eighty years. It’s the corner where a dead forty-footer leaned over her canopy all summer. It’s still not much to look at.

So I fix it.

I don’t ask. Asking means a conversation, and she’d tell me not to bother, and I’d bother anyway. I rake the ground level. I haul the chewed roots to the chipper. Then I take four of the split rounds off the stack I left her yesterday, the widest ones, and I set them low in the leveled dirt where the stump was—a short step up, a place to stand, a corner that’s solid now instead of a hole. She can put a chair there. Pumpkins. Whatever she wants.

I’m setting the last round when I feel the quiet again.

She’s at the corner of the canopy, watching me. The pale scare from the tree is gone.

“You leveled it,” she says.

“Ground was torn up. Would’ve been mud first rain.”

“You leveled the spot where my nightmare tree used to be and built me a little step out of my nightmare tree.” She comes closer, crouches at the rounds, sets her hand flat on the cut top of one, the way she did last night with the wood. “Wade.”

“Sap’s still wet. Give it a week before you sit on it in good pants.”

She laughs, but it breaks in the middle, and she looks up at me from the crouch and I look down at her and for a second, there’s nothing to fill—no saw, no crew far enough to matter, just her hand on the wood and her face turned up and the drop in me going lower than it’s gone.

I could crouch down. It’s four inches and a lifetime.

“Wade.” Deacon, from the truck. Saving me again. Or ruining me, I can’t tell which anymore. “We’re loaded. Clock’s on the next site.”

I straighten up. She straightens with me. The moment lets go of us both, like the trunk did, tipping back toward safe.

“We’re done here,” I tell her. “Stump’s out. Corner’s yours.”

“You’ll bring the cord this weekend.”

It’s not a question. She’s holding onto the thread on purpose, and I know it. I let her.

“Weekend.” I pick up my saw. “Light your kettle low the first time. Crack the propane slowly. If it doesn’t catch clean, kill it and call me. Don’t be a hero with forty gallons.”

“There he is. Nine words of romance and then a fire-safety lecture.”

“That was more than nine.”

Her whole face changes when I say it, opening up, and I climb into the truck carrying the sight of it. That’s going to be a problem tomorrow at dawn when I point my whole self at a title that has never once made me feel what a crouch in the gravel just did.

I don’t know how to say any of that.

I know how to come back with a cord of wood. So that’s what I’ll do.

5

NIKKI

The wood catches on the third try, and I sit back on my heels in the gravel, absurdly proud, watching my first real fire crackle up under the copper kettle.