Page 2 of Rough Cut Mountain Man

"No." A pause. "But she was ninety and she was pointing at somebody else's yard, so I let her have it."

Dry as bone, delivered without a flicker, and I laugh out loud in a mill office at eight forty in the morning.

I came here braced and worrying about the worst case scenario. Two calls from this man's lawyer and one from a realtor, and I'd built a whole picture: a guy circling my grandmother's land like wolves, ready to tell me what a girl from the coast doesn't understand about the interior. I brought comparables. I brought my flat voice.

"You want to sell?” he asks.

"I want to sell fast, at a fair number, and be back in Victoria by the end of the month."

He nods slowly. "Sixty-one acres. Twelve of it's the bench above my landing, good ground, drains right. The rest is bush and the creek and a lot of rock." He names a number.

It's fair. The comps in this valley are thin and weird and I've done the work, and his number is not the number of a man trying to take something from a woman with a dead grandmother and a loan balance she doesn't discuss at parties. It's within four percent of my own valuation. Over it, if I'm honest.

I say a number thirty grand higher and I hear how it sounds — reflex, habit, the muscle memory of eight years of negotiating fee schedules with contractors who assume I'll fold. It comes out of me the way a hand comes up to catch something thrown.

Gideon doesn't flinch. Doesn't smile, either, doesn't do the thing men do where they perform being wounded. He looks at me for a long second, and I have the uncomfortable feeling of being read accurately.

"No," he says.

"No?"

"That's not what it's worth." He leans one hip against his grandfather's counter, and the wood takes his weight without a sound. "You know that or you wouldn't have said it that fast."

Heat comes up the back of my neck and it isn't embarrassment, or not only. He's close enough now that I can see the sawdust on his collar. Fine as flour. I want, absurdly, to take it off with my thumb.

"I'll think about it," I say.

"Take the week."

"I don't need a week."

"Take it anyway." He says it without any weight at all, which is somehow worse. "Land like that, you should walk it before you sign it away."

"I walked it this morning."

Something moves behind his face. "You walked to the top of it."

"I walked the bench and the creek."

"Then you've seen about a fifth. Your grandmother did the whole line every May and it took her most of a day, and she was eighty-nine the last time."

"I have a firm expecting me."

"Sure." He picks up his gloves with a shrug. "Offer's good either way."

And that's it. He's turning back toward the mill floor and I'm standing there with an entire folder of comparables I don't get to use and my pulse doing something I'd rather it didn't.

"Dad?"

There's a girl in the far doorway.

She’s about seven years old, wearing an orange rain jacket over pyjama pants over rubber boots, brown hair escaping a braid that somebody did with real effort and no talent. She's holding a mason jar in both hands like it contains something that might get away.

"Rue," Gideon says, and his whole voice changes. It gets warmer by about ten degrees, the way a room changes when someone lights the stove. "You're supposed to be doing spelling."

"I did spelling." She comes in sideways, eyes on me the entire time, and holds up the jar. Sawdust. Layers of it — pale, then reddish, then a band of near-white, packed in stripes like a jar of sand from a gift shop. "Cedar, fir, then the birch from Tuesday. It's a sample."

"It's a good one," I say.