Page 8 of Mountain Man's Honeysuckle Darling
On the south bank, the honeysuckle was still climbing everything, scenting the whole channel with that heavy sweetness that got into the back of your throat. I sat in the canoe both times and looked at the bank and then paddled back to the outfitter.
Ross noticed. He had the sense not to say anything. Cade noticed too—I could tell by the way he found somewhere else to look. He’d been in approximately this situation himself not long ago. I didn’t bring it up. Neither did he.
I started going by the Alderman cabin every evening. I was running the south section and the cabin was on the south section. It was just part of the route. That was what I told myself, anyway.
The back deck was empty. The chairs were turned in the way they turned them when the cabin was closed between guests. The mug hooks were bare. The whole thing was quiet, waiting for the next vacationers.
I paddled past without stopping.
The deck was empty the next evening too. And the one after that.
6
SURI
Idrove back to Charlotte on Sunday morning with the windows down and the radio off and told myself I was fine.
Iwasfine. I had a plan. I’d always had a plan, and this one was a good one—a year abroad, real experience, the kind of thing you looked back on and knew you’d needed. I’d earned it. I’d worked for it. I was going to Italy in eight weeks and I was completely, entirely fine.
I made it five days.
Not five days before I fell apart—I didn’t fall apart, that wasn’t how I was built. Five days before I stopped being able to convince myself that what I was feeling was just the end-of-vacation letdown—the thing that happened every year when the cabin week ended and real life came back.
I’d felt it before. I knew what it felt like. It felt like leaving Wildwood Valley.
This was not that.
This was waking up on Wednesday morning and reaching for my phone to look up the outfitter’s website, just to see his name on a staff page, and catching myself with my thumb hovering over the search bar. This was standing in my Charlotteapartment on Thursday evening listening to the traffic outside and understanding, in a way I hadn’t let myself understand before, that I had spent my whole life surrounded by noise and called it normal. This was Friday night when Sunnie called and asked how I was doing and I said fine and she was quiet for exactly three seconds before she said, “Suri.”
Just my name. That was all she said.
I cried for about twenty minutes and then I left a voicemail for the program director.
She called me back Monday morning. The deferral took until Tuesday to process. I spent the days in between waiting and not telling anyone. I went to work and came home and sat on my apartment balcony looking at the parking lot below, which was not the river. I thought about the plan I’d spent two years building and tried to feel the loss of it and couldn’t find any. What I found instead was relief, and that told me more than the crying had.
He’d handed me a paddle without a word and taken me somewhere he didn’t take anyone. That was the thing I kept coming back to, sitting on my Charlotte balcony staring at the parking lot. Not the honeysuckle or the river or the way the evening light had gone gold through the hemlock—all of that was real, but underneath it was something simpler.
He’d already decided something about me. He just didn’t believe it would matter, because in his experience it never did. People came to Wildwood Valley and people left, and he’d made his peace with being the one who stayed.
I was going to be the one who stayed too.
The deferral came through on a Tuesday. I was in my car by noon.
Wildwood Valley looked the same. I drove in on the river road with the windows down and the honeysuckle coming in through the open windows before I could even see the water. Atension I’d been holding loosened. I didn’t even realize I’d been carrying it.
I had a guess where he’d be.
I’d thought about that on the drive down. Not in a nervous way. I’d burned through nervous somewhere around Statesville and come out the other side into something quieter and more certain. He’d told me about the south section that evening in the canoe—the stretch he ran alone, the bend he didn’t put on any map. If he was anywhere on a Tuesday evening after the last trip cleared, my best guess was there. And if he wasn’t, I’d wait at the outfitter dock until he came back.
I’d called my dad from a gas station outside Statesville. The cabin was between guests for ten days—a gap in the rental schedule before the August booking. He’d asked if I was sure. I’d said yes. He’d said the key was where it always was, and not to forget the porch light this time.
I parked at the outfitter and walked down to the dock.
The canoe rack was a slot short. The schedule board said his last trip had cleared at five. I sat down on the end of the dock with my feet in the shallows and waited.
He came around the upstream bend twenty minutes later. Paddle stroke easy and even, the same way he did everything—until he saw me. Then he went completely still in the canoe, paddle across his knees, the current carrying him slowly toward the dock while he just looked.
I felt the look land. Dark eyes, guarded the way they always were until you knew what was behind them.
