“Yeah,” he said. “Figured. Wait here.”
He disappeared around the side of the cabin and came back with a pair of rubber muck boots, green, ancient, roughly the size of kayaks, and set them in front of me with two more pairs of wool socks which he proceeded to stuff in the toes. “Can’t work barefoot.”
I put them on. I made a test lap of the porch. I looked like a garden gnome who’d been drafted into the merchant marine.
“Not one word,” I said.
“Wasn’t going to.” He was already walking toward the fence line, but I’d caught it — the corner of his mouth, moving. Those were two smiles I’d witnessed. I was keeping score.
***
Here is what I learned, trailing a mountain man through his day like a yippy little dog he’d made the mistake of feeding. One. He worked the way other people breathed. No wasted motion, no checking his phone, no standing back to admire. He stacked the split wood in a line so straight it looked surveyed, and when I put a piece on crooked to see what would happen, he straightened it without breaking stride and without comment, and I had to bite down on a delighted noise.
Two. He listened. That was the trick of him, and it took me half the morning to catch it. I talked — about my job, about the Brave Things list, item by item, everything from skydiving to salsa lessons to learning how to make bread that isn’t sad — and he grunted along when there was a silent moment. Which wasn’t often. Then I’d loop back an hour later and he’d say something. Not much, but enough to let me know he was listening. Maybe even taking notes.
And he touched me. That was the part I hadn’t been prepared for. Hoped for, yes. Prepared for, no.
His hand at the small of my back, moving me out of the path of a falling fence rail, and then staying two seconds past the danger. Two seconds I felt through the flannel, through skin, all the way down tothatpart of my body. The part that was soft and aching.
Then there was the time his fingers wrapped over mine on the wire stretcher, adjusting my grip, rough palm swallowing my knuckles whole.
“Like that,” he said, low, close to my ear, and I held the wire and nodded and did not hear a single word of the actual instruction, because his mouth against my ear was too distracting, and making me imagine other things. Him behind me, minus the fence. Minus our clothes. His hands adjusting my grip on a headboard instead of a wire stretcher.
“Got it?” he asked.
“Mm-hm.” I did not have it. The fence sagged where I’d been holding it, but I regretted nothing.
When we moved down the fence line he’d steer me with a palm on my shoulder, my hip, the back of my neck once — brief, warm, gone. Every touch left a print I could still feel hours later. By the third post I’d started leaning into them. By the fifth I was inventing reasons. My grip needed checking. The post needed holding. My hair needed rescuing from under the collar he’d fixed, knuckles grazing my nape, and I had to disguise the sound I made as a comment about elk.
“You’re awfully handsy for a hermit,” I told him, in the tone of a woman lodging a compliment disguised as a complaint.
“Making sure you don’t fall in a post hole.”
“There’s no post hole.”
“Planning ahead.”
“You,” I announced to his back, “are not as oblivious as advertised.”
“Nope.”
“That’s it? Nope?”
“That’s it.”
He let me follow him. That was the part I kept turning over while I handed him fence wire and held the post level and asked four hundred questions about elk. A man who’d built his whole life to hold exactly one person had a woman at his heels chattering about bread, and he hadn’t once looked at his watch or the road down the mountain. Somewhere around noon it stopped feeling like tolerance. He’d angle things toward me — hold the wire lower where I could reach, assign me the jobs that kept me in his shade, out of the sun. He was building me into his workday like a tool he’d decided to keep within reach.
The afternoon had been going great. Until the hose. Another encounter with water that had gone totally off the rails.
I’d been given one job — water the garden while he changed the truck’s oil. My only defense was that I was a city girl and hadn’t used a garden hose in decades. I lost the wrestling match in under ten seconds and took the spray directly in the face. And in the chest. Mostly in the chest.
Garrick laughed. An actual laugh, one short rusty syllable, startled out of him as he looked at me from under the truck hood.
“I heard that! That’s mine now, you can’t take it back!” I laughed as I tried to get the situation under control.
He stopped laughing, just stood there staring.
I looked down at myself and understood the situation.
