Page 1 of Kept By the Devoted Mountain Man
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Tessa
ThedrivefromVancouvertakes nine hours and I only stop twice. Once for gas outside Kamloops, once because I'm crying too hard to see the highway.
Silver Ridge appears around a bend in the road like it wasn't there a second ago, the valley opening up without warning, and I have to slow down just to take it in. Mountains. Real ones, not the ones you can see from the city on a clear day. These ones fill the windshield, snow still caught in the high places even in June, the lower slopes dark with pine. The town below them is wooden and sun-bleached and small, and there's a river somewhere nearby because I can hear it even with the windows up, or maybe I imagine that, maybe I want it to be true badly enough that my brain supplies it.
I want it to be true. I want a lot of things.
Brooks Boutique Hotel sits at the end of Main Street, a converted Victorian painted the colour of storm clouds and trimmed in cream. There are flower boxes under every windowand a hand-lettered sign above the door that looks like it was done by someone who actually knows calligraphy. I park and sit in my car for a moment, hands in my lap. The engine ticks.
Okay. Here.
Inside, a woman looks up from behind the front desk. She's maybe thirty-five, dark hair pinned up, wearing a linen apron over a floral dress, and she has the particular warmth of someone who genuinely means it when she says welcome.
"You must be Tessa." She comes around the counter with her hand extended. "I'm Maple. We spoke on the phone."
"Thank you for fitting me in at the last minute." I'd booked two days after the breakup. It wasn't a plan so much as an impulse that turned into a credit card charge before I could talk myself out of it.
"We had a cancellation. Timing worked out." She leads me up a wide staircase, talking as she goes. The walls are hung with old landscape photographs of the valley in different seasons, the mountains at different hours of light. "Breakfast is seven to nine, but I usually have coffee out by six if you're an early riser. There's a trail map on the dresser and I've marked the easy ones in green. Juniper's Diner is two blocks north."
My room is on the second floor, east-facing, with a window that frames a slice of mountain between two spruce trees. There's a quilt on the bed that looks handmade and a jar of wildflowers on the dresser. I stand in the middle of the room and the tightness in my body loosens just a bit.
"If you need anything," Maple says from the doorway, "I'm usually around."
"Thank you," I say, and I mean it more than she knows.
I spend the first morning doing nothing in particular. I walk Main Street in both directions. I drink Darlene's coffee at the counter at Juniper's and eat eggs I don't taste, but I’m sure they’re delicious.
I sit by the river on a flat rock and watch the water and try not to think about Daniel's face the night I finally say it out loud —I want children, I have always wanted children, and I think you've known that and chosen not to say anything for three years— and the way he looks at me, not surprised, just tired. Like I've finally gotten around to something he's been waiting to deal with.
I don't cry. Progress.
By early afternoon I'm restless in the particular way that happens when I don't have enough to do with my hands, which is probably how I end up in front of the Silver Ridge Public Library at half past two on a Tuesday in June with no intention of going in.
The library is a narrow wooden building squeezed between a hardware store and what looks like a former post office. There's a sandwich board out front: SUMMER READING PROGRAM — TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS, 1–3 PM — VOLUNTEERS WELCOME. Through the window I can see children's drawings taped to the glass, bright suns and lopsided animals, the particular aesthetic of primary grades.
I go in.
I'm a teacher. I've been a teacher for four years. I cannot walk past children's drawings and a sign that says volunteers welcome and keep walking — it's physically impossible, like asking someone to step over a dog without petting it.
Inside, the library is small and cool and smells like old paper and the particular kind of quiet that only exists in rooms full of books. A teenager is running the program. She’s seventeen, maybe eighteen, looking slightly overwhelmed by the eight kidsarranged on a rug in the reading corner. She looks up when I come in and her relief is so immediate I almost laugh.
"Hi. Are you here to volunteer?"
"I guess I am," I say.
Her name is Kaylee. She's filling in for the regular program coordinator who's on vacation until Thursday. She's wonderful with the older kids and completely out of her depth with the four-and-five-year-olds, which is exactly the gap I was built to fill.
I settle and find the kids who are tuned out and pull them back in, adjust the read-aloud pace, do the voices. I do the voices because a teacher who won't do the voices is a teacher who's lost the plot.
That's when I notice her.
She's sitting slightly apart from the group, at the end of the rug nearest the window, with a picture book open in her lap. The other kids are listening to Kaylee finish a story about a bear, but this one isn't. She's studying the page in front of her with the focused expression of someone doing something difficult, and it takes me a moment to understand: she's pretending to read. The book is upside down.
I cross the room and sit down on the floor beside her. Cross-legged, at her level, not hovering. She goes still without looking up, the way small animals go still when they sense something nearby.
"That one's good," I say, nodding at the book.
