Page 10 of Wild Harvest Mountain Man

"I want two days of you not managing the ending." Her hands come up and drop. "I have got a decision to make that is going to change my whole life and I would like to make it with the actual man, not the polite version who texts at five-forty in the morning. Because if I decide to stay here — and I might, Daniel, I genuinely might — I need to know whether what I'd be staying for is a person or a season."

She’s to the point. I appreciate that.

"That's fair," I say.

She gets back in the car.

I take one step off the porch. "Lena."

The window's down. She waits.

"I don't know how to do the next part," I say. "That's not an excuse. It's a fact about me."

"I know." Something in her face gentles. "Learn it fast. The market closes on the twenty-sixth."

She backs down the drive and turns onto the road and I stand there until I can't hear her engine over the creek.

Then I go inside and I don't turn a light on.

You're leaving before I do.

I sit down at the table in the dark with my coat still on.

She's right, and it's worse than she thinks, because it isn't only women. It's why I've never had a picker with me. It's why eleven years of crew know a version of me that's about forty percent of the total. It's not that people leave. It's that I've built a life where nobody's ever close enough to.

And a woman who has been in this valley for twelve days walked into it and said the name of it out loud, in my yard, in the middle of the afternoon.

Abuela's whole trick. You can't walk past a thing once you know what it's called.

I get up at some point and light the lamp and stand at the drying screens with my hands behind my back, and I say them out loud, low, the way I always do.

"Chanterelle. Hedgehog. Trumpet."

And then, because it's true, and because there's nobody here to hear it:

"Lena."

six

Lena

The email has been open on my laptop, haunting me.

Lena — schedule attached for the 20th, back on the pass after two services on sauté. Summer was instructive. There are things I want to change about how this kitchen runs and I'd like your input. — Y.

The truth is, I want it. I want to come through the staff entrance on Hamilton Street on Monday at half nine with my knife roll under my arm and have the prep cooks look up. I want Yves to say something short and approving about my hands. Two years of my life were organised around a nod from that man, and you can't pull that out of a person in six weeks on a mountain.

And the other thing. If I don't go back, what happened in April was that I broke. If I go back, it was a leave. A leave is what successful people take.

So I sit on the end of the bed with the radiator ticking and the window open two inches over the back lot, and I let myself want it properly, without arguing, for twenty minutes.

Then I open the other email.

It's five days old, and it's from Odile Tremblay, who owns The Larch House on the east end of Main. It’s a bistro with twenty-eight seats, a chalkboard that changes when the valley changes. I ate there on my fourth night in town and asked the server where the chanterelles came from and got told the mushroom guy. I emailed her that Sunday, the same night Yves sent the schedule, telling myself it was research.

She wrote back in nine minutes. Six years running her own pass, five months without a day off, nobody in the interior with fine-dining chops who wants to live here. She named a number eleven thousand under Vancouver and offered a share of the room, and I've been holding that arithmetic against a life where I get to watch what October does to a north-east slope.

I haven't answered her either.