Page 34 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"Check in now or after?" I ask, watching the rain sheet across the parking lot.
Logan looks at the diner through the glass. Then at the rain. "After," he replies. "The rain isn't letting up anytime soon. Might as well eat first."
We make a run for the covered entrance, and I get approximately one second of exposed sidewalk before the rain finds every gap in my jacket, which is not enough jacket for this situation and never was. Logan, for the record, looks unbothered in a way that I have come to accept is simply his relationship with the weather, not something worth commenting on.
Inside, a woman at the front desk looks up and nods at us with the unhurried acknowledgment, most likely seeing threeother groups come through the door in the last hour looking exactly like we do—slightly damp, slightly resigned, completely at the mercy of the mountain weather.
"Diner's through there," she offers, nodding toward the doorway. "Hot food, full menu."
"We'll check in after," Logan tells her.
She nods. We head through.
The diner is smaller than the one this morning and more worn, with a wall-mounted television in the corner showing weather coverage with the sound off and three tables occupied by people who all look like they've made the same calculation about the road that we did. We take the table farthest from the television.
Logan orders something with steak without looking at the menu, which doesn't surprise me. I take longer and order something I didn't expect to order—pot roast, the kind of thing I haven't eaten since I was a child at someone's grandmother's table—and when the server leaves, I find Logan watching me with that quiet attention.
"What?" I challenge.
"Nothing," he replies and picks up his water.
"You were about to say something."
"I was going to observe that you don't strike me as a pot roast person."
"What kind of person do I strike you as?"
He considers it genuinely, which I appreciate more than a quick answer. "Something with structure," he finally decides. "That requires specific execution."
I think about that. "That's—actually fair. But pot roast is what my grandmother made on Sundays, and I haven't had it in fifteen years, and I'm apparently making choices based on that today."
"That's a good reason," he replies simply.
The food arrives, and we eat, and the rain keeps coming outside the window, and the conversation does the thing it's been doing since the first night—moves without agenda, without the careful management of a dinner where everyone is performing a version of themselves for a specific purpose.
"Tell me something about growing up there," I request, somewhere between the bread and the main course, because the mountain has been present in everything Logan is, and I want to understand it better. "What it was actually like. Being a kid on that mountain. Before any of it was yours to run."
He thinks about it with the same genuine consideration he gives everything. "Loud," he finally offers. "In a good way. There were always people around. Meals were always full. Everyone sat together, kids and adults; nobody had a separate table." He pauses. "My father believed that if something was worth saying, it was worth saying in front of everyone. Which made for some interesting dinners."
I smile at the image of it. "What kind of things got said?"
"Arguments about the land, mostly. Who had the right of way on which trail and whether the north boundary needed reposting." A pause. "My mother used to say the mountain had more opinions than the people on it."
"Your mother sounds like she had it figured out."
"She had most things figured out." What crosses his face is not grief exactly, more like the particular warmth of a memory that belongs to someone who is gone. "She died when I was seventeen. But she packed a lot of figured-out into those seventeen years I had with her."
I set my fork down without meaning to. There's something about the way he says it—matter-of-fact and tender at the same time, not asking for anything back, merely offering it like it's a true thing, and true things are worth saying—that gets past whatever careful distance I've been maintaining.
"I'm sorry," I offer quietly.
He nods once, accepting it without making it smaller or larger than it is, which is the Logan way.
"It was hard on my father," he adds quietly. "He ran the operation alone for eleven years after that, until he passed when I was twenty-eight. But she left us both with enough to keep going."
Then, after a beat, he reaches across and refills my coffee from the carafe, and the gesture is so small and so completely automatic that I don't think he even registers doing it, which gives me an answer.
I register it.
