I wanted to say something. Anything.Stay. Don't go. I see you too. You belong here.Instead, I pulled back even harder. “You shouldn't have shown them that.”
Her face didn't crack. It just closed.
“I didn't show them you,” she said, her voice quiet. “I showed them what you make. I thought you'd know the difference.”
I opened my mouth to fix it. I couldn't. The fix required me to say the thing I had been refusing to say for two weeks. I could feel the shape of it in my chest. It was such a small thing, just three or four words.I want you to stayor evenplease, staybut the words felt so unfamiliar in my mouth that I couldn’t speak.
She gave me about three seconds. Then she nodded once. It was a small movement, more a closing than an acknowledgment, and she walked past me toward the parking lot where her SUV was parked.
A paper lantern fell off its string and rolled across the gravel. It stopped against my boot. I looked down at it and didn't move.
Bison's voice played through my head the whole way back up the ridge.You're going to make the room big enough that she walks out of it.
I drove past cabin three. Her lights were on. Her SUV was parked at an angle like she'd pulled in fast and hadn't bothered to straighten it. She was packing. I knew she was packing.
She’d been going to ask me if she could stay. I knew that the way I knew the runoff was bad in spring and the way I knew Mae would never give me the day-old rolls for free. She had been going to ask. She’d been waiting for me to give her one reason. Tonight I’d given her the opposite.
Biscuit was on her porch step.
I stopped the truck.
My dog looked at me through the windshield but didn't come. He just sat there and watched me with his ears down andhis tail still. I sat there with the engine running and understood that when I’d made a choice, he’d made one too.
I drove the rest of the way up to my cabin and sat on the porch step in the dark. Biscuit was gone. The ridge was quiet. After a long time I got up, crossed the gravel to the workshop, and turned on the light.
I picked up the spokeshave and looked at the piece of mountain ash I'd been avoiding for weeks. I knew what I had to make. Had known it for a while.
I pulled the wood onto the bench and started working.
CHAPTER 10
TREYTON
I worked through the dark.She had drawn flowers. I was going to carve them.
I measured twice because I didn't trust my memory and then again because I didn't trust my hands. Two boards. Front and back. The size of her sketchbook. The front board stayed plain, just the wood, oiled smooth with a small columbine carved offset in the corner where her thumb would rest when she held it. The back board required all the work.
The alpine meadow I carved on the inside included every flower from her book. The glacier lily she'd been lying beside the day she arrived. The pearly everlasting from the west fence. The forget-me-not she'd named Piper. The paintbrush. The columbine. All of them scattered across the back board the way they scattered in the high meadow where I'd first wanted to kiss her.
I worked from memory. I didn't need the sketchbook. I'd been watching her draw for weeks. I knew which flowers she came back to. I knew which ones got names.
My mind strayed but I didn’t let myself think about Soleil or about Bison’s last words. I didn’t think about what I was going to say to her in the morning or what the morning might look like orwhat I would do if she had already loaded the SUV by the time I got there.
I worked the way Mama Mae had taught me to work when I was thirteen years old and falling apart for the first time after she took me in.Yourhands know what they're doing, Treyton. Let them. Your head will catch up.
The columbine took the longest. Five petals, five spurs, the center dense with stamens fine enough they didn't look like splinters. I'd carved columbines before, but this one had to be right. It had to be perfect.
By five-thirty the carving was done.
I sanded both boards, oiled them with the linseed I used for everything I cared about, and left them on the bench to dry. Then I walked out of the workshop into the pre-dawn cold with the light coming up gray over the east ridge.
The valley was full of fog and my breath misted in the air. Biscuit wasn’t on my porch. He was where I'd left him last night, a hundred yards down the ridge on her porch step. Even in the early gray light, I could see him. He knew what love was. He’d sat at her door all night and waited.
I walked down to my cabin and got cleaned up. Then I wrapped the two boards in a piece of clean canvas, carried them under my arm, and walked down the ridge to Soleil’s door.
The light was on in her kitchen. I wasn’t surprised to see she was already awake. I had known that, in some way that lived in the same place as my hands — she had been awake the whole time I had been working, and we had been awake on the same ridge in the same dark for the same six hours, and the only difference between us was that I had been carving so I could convince her to stay while she’d been packing to leave.
Biscuit raised his head when I came up the gravel path. He didn’t bother to get up. He just looked at me with the patient look of a dog reserving judgment.
