Page 3 of Bonfire with the Mountain Man

There’s a catch in this somewhere. There’s always a catch. I just haven’t found it yet.

I climb down. Boone’s already got the tailgate, testing the weight of the first crate like it’s nothing. I have to move fast to get to the other end before he tries to carry it alone.

“I’ve got that side,” I say.

“I’ve got both sides.”

“It’s my fruit. I lift my own fruit.”

He looks at me over the top of the crate, but he doesn’t argue. He just shifts his grip so I can get mine, and we walk it in together through the bay and into the back of the tasting room, where the light’s better and the air smells like oak.

We fall into it without talking. Him lifting, me sorting, the crates coming off the truck one after another into the wash sink running along the back wall. He works quietly. I keep waiting for him to slow down—to actually look at what he bought and start adding up what it’s going to cost him.

Boone doesn’t add it up. He just works.

It’s the seconds that get me every time. I run my hands through the crates in the sink, Jonathans and Arkansas Blacks and the odd Wolf River all jumbled together, turning up the scabbed ones, the bruised ones, the little misfits that never had a chance at a display case. My dad used to say an orchard is mostly seconds, and the trick is finding somebody who doesn’t care about pretty. He said it like it was easy.

He said a lot of things like they were easy, right up until the winter he decided the whole thing was too hard and moved to Arizona with a woman named Deb. My brother followed him out west a year later. I stayed.

Somebody had to stay. The trees don’t wait.

So the orchard became mine. Not because anybody handed it to me, but because I was the only one left to hold it.

“These Jonathans are good,” Boone says.

I look up. He’s holding one, turning it. It’s the scabbed one I set aside.

“They’re seconds,” I say.

He sets it in the keep pile. “They’re good.”

I don’t know what to do with that, so I go back to the sink.

We work through the light going. Through the window over the sink, I can see the strip settling into evening, the string lights bright now. A few couples wander the boardwalk with cider cups—leaf-peepers up from the city to look at my mountain like it’s a painting somebody hung for them. The tasting room empties out front, the last of the daytime crowd drifting off to dinner.

I figure that’s it for the night. I figure we’ll finish the wash and he’ll send me off, and I’ll drive back up the pass in the dark with a check in my pocket. It’ll be the best thing that’s happened to the orchard all year, and I’ll have made it out before the catch shows up.

Then Boone dries his hands on a rag and says, “Come out back a minute.”

The fire pit sits in a gravel yard behind the building, ringed by stone, aspens crowding the fence line beyond it. He crouches and works at the kindling, and in under a minute there’s flame, small and then not small, throwing orange up the old brick wall.

“Locals come for it,” he says, standing and brushing off his hands. “This time of year. Give it twenty minutes.”

He’s right. They come. The back door opens, and a couple I half recognize from the coffee shop step out, followed by two more people, then a man with a dog. All of them nod at Boone like they’ve done this a hundred times, pulling the chairs around the fire into a loose ring. Somebody has a guitar he doesn’t really play. He just holds it. The pours start coming out, Boone ducking in and back with glasses.

I stand at the edge of it with a crate still in my hands. I don’t know where to put myself.

For three years, I’ve backed my truck up to this building in the dark, dropped my crates in that alley, and driven off before anybody inside was awake. I’ve never seen the front of this place lit up at night. I’ve never sat at this fire. I didn’t know there was a fire. I’ve been the delivery, never the guest, and standing here now on the wrong side of my own routine, I feel something I can’t get a handle on.

Boone finds me at the edge of the light. “You can set the crate down.”

“I’m working.”

“You can set it down and still be working.” He takes it out of my hands and sets it on the wash bench by the door. Then he holds out a glass. Amber, small pour. “Apple brandy. Last year’s. Made from fruit that came off a truck about like yours.”

I take it. My fingers brush his around the glass, and there’s a warmth that goes up my arm and settles somewhere I’m not ready to think about. I pull my hand back too fast and nearly slosh the pour.

He doesn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he does, and he’s kind enough not to say.