Page 12 of Reunited with the Mountain Man

The art of stacking bonfires is one of the things Silver Ridge does without needing to discuss it, the institutional knowledge passing from one generation of volunteers to the next. Three meters of cured hardwood, stacked with room for air, and when it goes up it goes clean and fast and lights the whole grounds amber. The heat of it reaches thirty meters out. Standing near it with the August night air still warm on your back is one of the better physical experiences available to a human being, and I'd forgotten that, the way you forget things when you spend ten years making yourself too busy to remember.

The crowd fills in around the fire as the sky goes fully dark. Families with kids on their shoulders. Old couples with lawn chairs who were probably at the first one of these, sixty years back. The log-rolling competitors still loud from the day's events, someone passing around a bottle near the equipment shed. The vendors are doing their last hour of business and the smell coming off the stalls is woodsmoke and pulled pork and fresh-ground coffee and something sweet from a pie table near the north fence.

Owen stands beside me with his shoulder against mine. His arm is warm against my arm and when someone comes up to congratulate him on the axe-throwing he introduces me. The man he introduces me to nods like something has just been confirmed, which is how Silver Ridge works: the town was already holding a version of this outcome, and the confirmation is not a surprise so much as a relief.

The old man running the cider stand catches my eye across the fire and nods at us and I catch him smiling at his cups.

The town knows.

The town has always known, probably. That's the thing about Silver Ridge — it's been holding this unfinished story for a decade and it's been patient about it in the way that old placesare patient. The mountains have been here longer than any of us. They are not in a hurry.

Grace

11 Months Later...

TheCanadaDayfireworksstart at ten and Owen has been watching the sky for the last twenty minutes like he can make them happen faster by paying attention.

We're on the roof of the community center. His idea — he knows which door the maintenance key lives behind and he knows the pitch of the roof won't kill you if you're careful, and he spread an old moving blanket up here before he came to get me from my mother's party.

My mother's party is still going below. I can hear it — voices and someone's playlist and the particular laughter of a woman on her third glass of wine, which is my aunt. The whole street has been out since five. Lawn chairs, kids with sparklers, the smell of charcoal from a dozen barbecues.

Silver Ridge takes Canada Day seriously.

I am glad I'm here.

That's the thing I keep noticing, the thing I don't say out loud because it would sound like a greeting card but it's trueanyway. My laptop is at his cabin. My phone is in my pocket with the ringer off. I have three client emails I'll answer in the morning and a Timber Festival vendor layout that's forty percent complete and a contract renewal for the fall events circuit sitting in my drafts folder, and a life that fits me in a way the Vancouver version never quite did, like I was wearing someone else's coat for a decade and didn't notice until I took it off.

I moved here in February. I have a desk in Owen's spare room and a coffee mug that is specifically mine and opinions about where things go in the kitchen that he mostly humors and occasionally ignores. We have arguments about the thermostat and about whether the dog at the end of his road needs to be reported to anyone and about what constitutes a reasonable hour to leave a work party. They are the most ordinary arguments I've ever had and I would not trade a single one.

Owen hands me a beer. He's been lying on his back with his hands behind his head, but he sits up when the first rocket goes off — a white burst that lights the mountains for half a second and then fades. Another one. Red. The sound arrives a beat late, the low concussive thud of it rolling off the rock faces.

"Good view," I say.

"Told you."

"You could have just saidthere's a good view from the community center roof.You didn't have to be mysterious about it."

"More fun this way."

He's not looking at me. He's watching the sky, the next rocket climbing, and his face in the white flash of it is settled and easy in the specific way of a man who is exactly where he wants to be. I've been watching that face for almost a year now.

The fireworks come faster — the mid-show run, overlapping bursts, the crowd below making noise in waves. His shoulder is against mine and his hand is on my knee, not moving, just there,warm through my jeans. I lean into him and he shifts his weight to make room for me without breaking his gaze from the sky, automatic, like something he's been doing for years.

Below us someone sets off a ground spinner and a kid shrieks and a dog barks three blocks over and the mountains keep doing what the mountains do, which is be enormous and unmoved and faintly pink at the summits even at this hour because it's July and the light never fully leaves.

A green burst, then gold, then three whites in fast sequence. The finale is building.

"Owen…”

"Yeah."

"I like it here."

He holds my gaze for a moment, then speaks quickly, as if he is afraid he might loose his nerve. “Marry me.”

I’s almost not sure that I heard him right. “Huh?” I gasp, in a most unladylike way. Not how I imagined a proposal, not that I ever did. Really.

Owen laughs. “Grace, will you marry me?”

“Yes, of course, yes.” I keep my voice steady and kiss him.

He turns his hand on my knee so his palm is up and I put my hand in his and the finale goes off above us — six, eight, ten rockets in sequence, the sound of it continuous, the whole sky lit amber and white and the mountains going visible and invisible in the strobing light.

When the last one fades, Owen lifts my hand and presses his mouth to my knuckles.

The smoke from the fireworks drifts north on the warm July air, breaking apart against the mountain faces. The night smells of cordite and pine and someone's barbecue on the next block, and I'm sitting on a roof in my hometown with a man who waited ten years and I am, without qualification or caveat, happy.

Second Chance. Secret Baby. One Night with the Mountain Man.