Page 6 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Mountain Man

HOLDEN

Seven weeks. That's how long a wrong number has been the best part of my day.

The realization arrives while I'm elbow deep in a mare's birth canal at 3am on the Hendersons' east pasture. Foal is breech. Back legs presenting instead of front. The mare is exhausted, Tom is holding a flashlight with shaking hands, and my phone buzzes in my jacket pocket draped over the fence post.

Can't answer it. Won't check it for another two hours. Doesn't matter. I already know who it is, because nobody else texts me at this hour. Nobody else texts me at all.

The foal comes out slick, steaming, alive. Tom's flashlight drops. He's crying. The mare lifts her head, nickers at the wet thing on the ground, starts licking. This mother, at least, chooses to stay.

Sunrise paints the mountains copper. My arms ache to the shoulders. Blood and amniotic fluid have dried on my forearms, crusted under my nails. Sitting on the Hendersons' porch with a mug of the worst coffee I've ever tasted, I pull out my phone.

Question. If you could only eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be? And don't say something boring like steak. I already know you're a steak person. You radiate steak energy through the phone.

Sent at 1:14am. Then, twelve minutes later:

Actually never mind. I know the answer. It's whatever you can cook in a cast iron pan over an open fire while looking disapproving. That's your whole vibe.

Then, 2:47am:

I can't sleep. My sister called today. She's pregnant. Third baby. My mother cried happy tears for forty minutes. When I told her Marrow and Light got picked up by a fifth boutique, she asked if I'd considered going back to school.

I'm really tired, Holden. Not the sleep kind.

My chest does that thing again. The tightening. The pull toward a voice I've never heard coming from a woman I've never seen living a life five thousand kilometers away that has absolutely nothing to do with mine.

Pounded yam and egusi soup. My mom's recipe. She makes it for Christmas and it's the only thing that makes December bearable.

Wait. You celebrate Christmas?

Mara. Everyone celebrates Christmas.

YOU HAVE A MOTHER??? You've never mentioned family. I assumed you were grown in a lab and released into the wild.

I have a mother. A brother in Cranbrook. His wife. Two nephews I see at Thanksgiving when my sister in law guilts me into showing up.

Oh my god. You have a WHOLE FAMILY. Do they know you're this grumpy or do you save it for strangers?

They know.

Do they know about me?

My thumb stops. The question sits on the screen. Do they know about me. Such a simple sentence. Such a complicated answer, because no, they don't know about her. Nobody knows about her. She exists in a compartment of my life that has no label, no category, no explanation I could give my brother or my mother or Darren that would make any sense.

What would I say? That a woman texted me about a golden retriever two months ago and now she's the last thing I read before I close my eyes? That she told me about her father dying when she was seventeen, how he collapsed at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning while making her fried plantains, how the ambulance took eleven minutes, how she still can't eatplantains? That she told me, and the grief in her words matched something in mine so precisely it scared me?

No. They don't.

Why not?

Because I don't know how to explain what this is.

The three dots appear, disappear, appear again. Forty seconds of her typing, deleting, retyping.

Neither do I.

Week six changes something.

The texts get longer. More specific. She describes the garage studio at midnight, how the wax looks like amber when it's cooling, how she plays Fela Kuti while she works because her father used to. She asks me what the mountains look like at dawn. Asks what sound snow makes when it falls on still water. Asks questions nobody has asked me in five years because nobody's been curious enough to wonder what my world looks like through my eyes.