Page 5 of Bonfire with the Mountain Man

“Because it grows on the same row, and I’m not going to leave fruit on the tree to spite a variety.” She drops the Wolf River in the mash pile without ceremony. “Use your Arkansas Blacks for the character and cut with the Jonathans for the sugar. Don’t let anybody sell you on a single-variety mash. That’s a marketing story, not a recipe.”

I set down the crank. “You know more about this than I do.”

“I know apples. You know what to do with them after they stop being apples.” She says it seriously. No little laugh at the end to take it back. “That’s not the same knowledge. Don’t confuse them.”

I’ve had distillers twice her age say something half that sure and then apologize for it. She doesn’t apologize. She just goes back to sorting, like she’s told me the time.

I like it more than I should.

We run another hour. The carboy fills. My shoulders are done, and so are hers. I can tell by the way she rolls one and keeps going anyway. Around two in the morning, she straightens up, wipes her wrist, and looks at me across the press.

“Why’d you say yes so fast?”

I knew it was coming. She’s been wondering since the tasting room—turning it over the way she turns the fruit.

“You barely let me get the pitch out,” she says. “I’ve been selling to that grocer for three years, and he made me beg every fall. I walk into a place I’ve never set foot in, and the owner buys the whole load before I finish my sales pitch. People don’t do that. So.” She folds her arms. “Why?”

Here’s the whole truth. Three years of watching her truck come down the pass. The particular rattle of her engine that tells me it’s October. The mornings I’ve stood at the front window with a coffee going cold, watching a woman do the work of two people in the dark and drive off before the town was awake, and thinking, not once but every single time, that somebody ought to make it easier for her while knowing that nobody ever would.

I don’t give her the whole truth. It’s two in the morning, and she’s tired. She’d bolt.

“Because you priced it to lose,” I say. “And I’ve spent fifteen years buying things other people were done fighting for. I know the look. You walked in wearing it.” I hold her eyes. “I wasn’t going to be one more person who let you sell yourself short.”

It’s true. It’s just not all of it.

She doesn’t say anything. She unfolds her arms, folds them again. Then she moves toward the propped door and the cold, and I follow her because I’m not ready for whatever this is to end. We end up out at the fire pit—the low burn I banked hours ago still throwing enough heat to matter.

She stands with her back to the yard, to the cold coming down off the ridge, her face lit orange from the coals. I stand close enough to feel the difference. Cold at my spine, heat off the fire on my face, and her right there in the middle of it, looking up at me like she’s still studying a man who won’t behave the way men are supposed to.

“You’re not telling me everything,” she says.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’d get in your truck and leave.”

Her breath fogs between us. She doesn’t get in her truck and leave.

“I might get in my truck anyway,” she says, quieter.

“I know.”

I don’t reach for her. I want to. I keep my hands where they are and let her stand in the space and decide. A woman who prices herself to lose and expects a no from every man she meets should get to choose the one thing that’s actually hers.

She’s the one who closes it. She goes up on her toes, gets a fist in the front of my shirt, and pulls me down to her mouth.

The cold’s at my back, and she’s all heat. I slide one hand into her hair and put the other flat against her spine. I’m careful, letting her set the pace.

She doesn’t want careful. She kisses me like she’s proving something—to me or to herself I can’t tell—and when she finally pulls back an inch, she keeps the fist in my shirt.

“I wanted to do that,” she says.

“I know.” My voice has gone rough. “I’ve been waiting on it since you walked in.”

“Don’t wait on the next one.”

I don’t.