“Sure.”
“I wanted to ask you what you’re doing in September. A friend of mine runs a winter artists' residency on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Six months, a full stipend, a gallery show at the end. She's looking for a name for this season, and I gave her yours. She'd like to talk this week.”
“Maine over the winter?”
“I know it's a lot. I'm just floating it. Think about it, will you?”
A customer came in and pulled her attention to the front of the store. I stood by the coffee pot for a beat with my hands wrapped around a mug I’d been holding for the entire conversation. Maine in winter. Mount Desert Island. A residency I hadn't asked for, in a place I’d never been.
I set my mug down on the counter and turned to leave. Treyton stood in the doorway of the back room. From the look on his face, he’d been standing there long enough to hear at least part of the conversation.
We drove back up the ridge in different cars. By late afternoon, the wall was back.
He came up to my porch the next day with a cinnamon roll from Mae's, set it on the railing without knocking, and walked back down the ridge before I could open the door. When I called after him, he didn’t stop and didn’t turn around.
I picked up the back and went back inside. Standing in the kitchen, I looked down at the drawer below the sink where the seventh carving lived and made a different decision than the one I’d made earlier in the week.
It was time to go. Whatever was going on between the grump of Hollow Peak and me had to end. I pulled the empty boxes out of the closet and started filling them with sketchbooks and my finished illustrations.
I packed them one at a time, with paper between each one, hoping he would walk back up the ridge before I was done.
CHAPTER 9
TREYTON
Bison rolledup the ridge at two-thirty on Friday with road dust on his jeans and a charity-ride patch sewn onto the back of his leather jacket. I heard the bike from inside the workshop and came out to find Biscuit already losing his mind, running circles around the Harley like he was just a pup.
Bison killed the engine, swung off, and pulled me into a hug before I could say anything. The kind Mama Mae had trained back into both of us years ago. The kind that used to feel like work and didn't anymore.
He let me go. He stepped back. He looked at my face for half a second.
“Oh,” he said. “So she's already here, then.”
“Shut up.”
“That bad?”
I didn't answer. I walked back to the porch step and sat down. He followed. Biscuit settled between us with his chin on Bison's boot, which was a betrayal I had been expecting and had decided in advance not to feel.
“I'm gonna need a beer,” Bison said.
“It's two in the afternoon.”
“I rode in from Salina, Kansas at six this morning. It's a beer.”
I went inside and brought him a beer.
He sat on my porch in the early afternoon sun and drank it slow, the way Bison drank everything slow, and he looked out over the meadow and the gravel turnout and Cabin Three with the door shut and the empty boxes I knew were stacked inside it, and he didn't say anything for the first ten minutes. That was Bison. He waited.
“Tell me about the charity ride,” I said.
“Wyoming. Tomorrow. Three hundred miles in two days for the veterans' foundation. I'm riding with two of Mae's church people and a guy from Lubbock who can't shift without grinding it.” He took a long pull on the beer. “I'll tell you about it next time. Talk to me about her.”
“Bison.”
“I said talk. I didn't say apologize. Talk.”
I drank. Set the bottle on the armrest. “She's leaving in a week.”
