Page 9 of Mountain Man's River Rush
“Wells,” she said against my neck.
“Yeah.”
“I meant it. I’m staying.”
“I know.”
She pulled back just enough to look at me. Her hair was a disaster—the braid long gone, dark strands stuck to her jaw and her shoulders.
Her eyes had gone soft—no edge, no readiness, no storm. Something underneath all of that. Something she’d been protecting so hard she’d forgotten it was there.
“Not just tonight,” she said. “Not just for the next trip. I mean I’m staying.”
I brushed a strand of hair off her face and tucked it behind her ear. My hand was shaking. I’d run Dead Man’s Pocket a hundred times with steady hands, and this woman had me shaking.
“I heard you the first time,” I said.
The corner of her mouth moved—the beginning of the smile that had been pulling at me since yesterday, finally landing. Warm and real and aimed at me like I’d earned it.
I kissed her forehead. Then her nose. Then the corner of that smile, because I could, because she was here, because she wasn’t leaving.
The river kept going outside. The mini fridge droned. The logbook was still open on the desk, the pen still where I’d set it down, the incident column still blank.
I was never going to log the rock. But I was never going to forget who saw it.
5
LINCOLN
Icalled my mother from the porch of the Wildwood Valley Inn.
It was early afternoon. Wells had driven me back after we’d cleaned up the office—put the cushions back on the couch, closed the logbook, locked the back door. He’d kissed me once more in the parking lot, unhurried, his hand on the back of my neck, and then he’d said “Tomorrow” like it was a fact and not a question, and I’d said “Tomorrow” back, and he’d driven away.
I sat on the porch with my phone in my hand for a long time before I dialed. The mountains were going gold in the late light, and the air smelled like honeysuckle and warm gravel, and I was about to have a conversation I’d been putting off for years.
She picked up on the second ring. “Lincoln. Are you okay?”
That was how she always answered. Not hello. Not how are you. Are you okay? Three words that carried the full weight of every emergency room visit, every nebulizer treatment, every night she’d sat in a plastic hospital chair and listened to me wheeze.
“I’m fine, Mom. I’m good.”
“Where are you? Your father said you mentioned a trip, but you didn’t say where?—”
“I’m in the mountains. Western North Carolina. A little town called Wildwood Valley.”
Silence. I could hear her doing the math—how far from a hospital, how remote, what the air quality would be like at elevation.
“The pollen counts are high in the mountains this time of year,” she said.
“Mom. I haven’t had an asthma attack in fourteen years.”
“I know that.” Her voice tightened the way it always did when I said this—not angry, just braced. Still waiting for the day it came back. Still listening for the wheeze in my breathing that hadn’t been there since I was nine.
I leaned back in the chair and looked at the mountains. Somewhere behind them, the river was still running through the gorge—over Jawbone, through The Churn, down the drop at Dead Man’s Pocket. Tomorrow morning, Wells would be on the dock checking floor lacing, and I would be there fifteen minutes early, and we would do it again.
“I went whitewater rafting today,” I said. “Class IV.”
The silence this time was longer. Heavier.
