“Gibson.”
“Yeah, alright. Fence is done. You want lunch?”
“No.”
I left the cedar leaning on the post and took the long way home, not sure what I planned on doing when I got there.
I parked the truck at the head of the south trail and got out and started up on foot with Biscuit running ahead of me. Every once in a while, he’d look back with the patience of a dog who had been waiting for me to catch up to where he’d been for weeks.
Stretching my legs gave me time to think. I walked the rest of the way up the ridge, and Soleil was on my porch when I came around the last bend. She sat on the top step with her sketchbook open, and the afternoon light coming down over her shoulder.
Biscuit had already accelerated past me and was halfway across the gravel before I'd registered her.
She looked up but didn't smile. “I drew Biscuit. Do you want to see?”
I sat down on the step next to her, not trusting myself to speak.
CHAPTER 8
SOLEIL
I foundthe seventh carving in the kitchen of my own cabin. I’d been opening the drawer by the sink to look for a teaspoon and my fingers brushed against the underside of the drawer face. There it was…a small leaf, three veins, the lobe slightly curled. I recognized it as a mountain maple, the kind that grew in the lower elevations around Hollow Peak and turned the canyon below red in fall. He’d carved it in a cabin he rented to strangers four months out of the year, where the previous tenants had probably never noticed that the underside of a kitchen drawer in a vacation cabin had been thought about by anyone at all.
I held the drawer open with my hip and ran my thumb across the leaf while I counted. There had been a carving on the bench at the lookout, the drawer in my cabin, and the vine under the seat of the chair at the Switchback. I’d loved the meadow scene under the shelf in his workshop, and the pine sprig he’d put inside the soap boxes. The last time I’d been at his cabin, I’d found a grain pattern on the underside of the windowsill above his kitchen sink. And now I’d found a maple leaf in the drawer of cabin three.
Twelve days had passed since we spent the night at the miner’s cabin. And it had been four days since he’d brought mecoffee on my porch at six in the morning without being asked. He’d set the cup on the railing next to my sketchbook, then walked back to his workshop without saying a word. Two days ago I’d fallen asleep on his porch with my sketchbook open on my chest and woken up with his jacket draped over me.
We didn’t talk about any of it. We hadn’t mentioned the night at the miner’s cabin. Or the carvings. Or the time that was slipping away quicker than I wanted it to. We’d built a small, mutually-agreed-upon silence between us. It had been working, but it couldn’t continue.
I opened the drawer and picked up a teaspoon. Then I went and stood at the kitchen window with my coffee and looked down the ridge at the gravel turnout where his truck was parked. In that moment, I made a decision I had been making in pieces for days.
I wasn’t going to tell him I’d found the carvings. Not the bench. Not the drawer in my cabin. Not the chair at the Switchback. Not the windowsill, not the soap boxes Gibson had told on him about without knowing what he was telling, not the meadow under the shelf in his workshop.
He hid beauty inside everything he built. He hid it from everyone, and he’d been letting me find it on my own. He hadn’t pointed me at any of them except the columbine under the side table in the workshop. He’d been letting me look.
I wasn’t going to tell anyone about the carvings. Mae would have liked to know. The world that bought hand-built furniture from a man named Berg had no idea what they had on the underside of their pieces.
I was going to leave it at that. I was going to let him keep what he was hiding, but I was going to draw the columbine into my book so I could take a tiny part of him with me when I left his ridge.
I picked up my sketchbook and walked down to his cabin.
He was on the porch with Biscuit. He had a mug of coffee in one hand and the other hand on Biscuit's head, scratching slow, and he was watching the meadow do what the meadow did in mid-morning, which was breathe with the wind. He saw me coming and didn’t stand. He just slid sideways on the step to make room.
I sat down next to him and opened my sketchbook.
“Working?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
He didn't ask what I was working on. He never asked what. He’d figured out within a week that my answer would be whatever I was doing right then, which was sometimes a flower, sometimes him, sometimes nothing in particular.
I drew. He scratched Biscuit. Down the ridge a hawk was working the updraft on the east face and the wind moved in the columbines and we sat on his porch step shoulder to shoulder for what was, when I checked my phone later, an hour and fourteen minutes.
His phone rang. He looked at the screen before deciding to answer. “Hey, Mama Mae.”
I should have left then, but I didn't want to move.
He walked to the porch railing and stood with his back to me, looking down the ridge, and I heard him say “no, ma'am” and then “yes, ma'am” and then a long pause during which someone in Broken Bend, Texas was saying something that he was letting wash over him without interrupting. Then he said, “she's fine.” Then “Bison's coming through at the end of the month, I know. I know.” Then, after another pause: “Yes, I'm eating. I gotta go.”
