Page 13 of Wild Harvest Mountain Man

At two, Odile comes down the row in a coat the colour of rust with her hands jammed in the pockets and stops in front of the stall like a customer.

"Two hundred of the trumpets," she says. "And the ugly matsutake, all of them, don't grade them for me."

"I never grade them for you," Daniel says.

She takes the paper parcel and tucks it under her arm and looks at me over the top of the scale, and there's an assessment happening that I'm choosing to enjoy. "Thursday. Nineteen covers again, then twenty-six on Friday, and I want the board in your handwriting from now on because mine's illegible by comparison."

She's gone before I can answer. Daniel is doing something with his mouth that on another man would be a grin.

"She likes you," he says.

The rush thins around three. He counts the float and I break down the empty crates, and the two of us fall into the rhythm of a close without discussing it, which is a thing that either happens between two people or doesn't.

The stall opposite starts packing at half past and the row goes with it, canvas coming down all along the east side in a rolling clatter, forty years of muscle memory in a town that knows exactly how to end things.

Then he pulls a notebook out of the inside pocket of his coat.

It's disgusting. Green cover gone black at the corners, swollen from twenty seasons of rain, held with an elastic that has clearly been replaced many times and recently.

"Don't laugh," he says.

"I'm not laughing."

He opens it on the table between the scale and the till. Every page is a map. Not to scale, no compass, only landmarks in his own shorthand — big leaner, creek bend, the burn — and dates going back to 2006, and yields in kilos, and weather notes, and here and there a name for a spot that only exists in this book. The cathedral. Rosaria's bench.

"Nobody's seen this," he says.

"I believe that."

"I mean nobody. Not the buyers. Not my crew." He turns to the back, past this year, to a clean page. There's a heading already on it in pencil. Next Oct. And underneath, a list of eleven draws, numbered, with two initials beside each one.

D. L. D. L. D. L.

I look at it for a while. "You've split them?" I ask. This is almost as romantic as the wet socks invitation.

"You'll want your own ground." He's looking at the notebook, not at me, and his ears have gone red.

"Daniel."

He looks up.

"Say it properly," I say.

He puts his hand flat on the open page.

"I want you here next October," he says. "And the one after. I want you at the pass on Thursdays and I want you on that bench when the first flush comes in and I don't want to do a season on my own again, and I've had twenty of them, so I know what I'm comparing it to." His jaw does the thing it does. "I'm not asking you to stay. You already stayed. I'm telling you I'm not going anywhere first. Not in the second week, not in November, not at all."

The market noise goes on around us. Somebody's kid is losing an argument about a candy apple two stalls down.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay?"

"You've written my initials in the holy book, Daniel. I don't know what else you want from me." My eyes are doing something and I let them. "Yes. Obviously yes. I turned down the only job I'd ever wanted on Friday and slept nine hours."

He comes around the end of the table and kisses me in front of the entire east row of the Silver Ridge Harvest Market, which is not a small thing in a town this size, and I hear at least one person whistle and I do not care even slightly.

We load it as the light goes long and yellow across the field. The season's over. The forest is going to shut down in three weeks and go under snow and do nothing at all until spring, and that used to be the part I'd have found unbearable — the empty stretch, the nothing, the not-producing.