Page 2 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

"Orrin Vane. My cidery's the other side of your fence line." He comes in. He doesn't sit. "Hettie's told me no about that parcel every spring for two years. Then last week she wouldn't say anything at all, which is how I knew."

"I don't tell my clients' business," Hettie says.

"You told me plenty by not telling me." He's still looking at me. "I've got a proposal. I've had a proposal since June. Nine acres, fair number, I'll show you the comparables myself."

"Have you got financing?"

The question lands where I aimed it, and I watch him take it. He doesn't flinch. He crosses his arms.

"Credit union's got my application. Approval takes three weeks."

"I have four days."

"Then give me three weeks."

"I can't."

He waits. He's good at it — better than most people who negotiate for a living, and I do this for a living. I close the folder. "Mr. Vane—"

"Orrin."

"Orrin. I flew in this morning. I'm on a plane Friday evening. There's a buyer with cash sitting in trust and a lawyer down the hall who can have this closed by the end of week, and there is no version of this where I sit in a hotel for a month waiting on a credit union in a town I've never lived in."

"Who's the buyer?"

Hettie says nothing. She has become very interested in her desk blotter, picking at something invisible.

"Northgate Storage Partners," I say.

Something happens in his face. Not anger. Worse. A kind of stillness that comes down over him like a shutter, and I feel it in the room the way you feel a door open somewhere else in a house.

"You're selling to a storage company," he says.

"I'm selling to whoever's ready to close by Friday. That's you or it's them."

"Two hundred steel boxes." He says it evenly, which is somehow more effective than shouting. "On the last flat, south-facing, creek-fed piece of ground inside the town boundary. Do you know what's in that dirt?"

"Nine acres of Class 3 agricultural soil with a lapsed water licence and no productive use since 1981."

"Do you know what your grandfather planted on it?"

I open my mouth. Nothing comes.

He watches me not have the answer, and, this is the part I don't forgive him for, he doesn't use it. He doesn't press. He looks at me a second longer, and then he takes a card out of his jacket pocket and sets it on the corner of Hettie's desk. It's printed on thick stock, a little soft at the edges from riding around in his pocket. COLE'S CIDER. And a line drawing of a creek.

"You'll be driving past me either way," he says. "Come in when you do."

"To be lobbied."

"To be poured something." He's at the door. He stops with one hand on the frame. "For what it's worth, I don't want it because I want to own more of anything. I want it because I've been buying fruit off four different farms for eight years and shipping it forty minutes to a press I built with my own hands. It's a lifeline."

Then he's gone. I hear boots across the floorboards, and then the bell over the door.

I sit there with my hand flat on the folder.

Through Hettie's window I can see him crossing Main to a truck with a cider press stencilled on the door, stopping twice on the way — once for a woman with a stroller, once for a kid on a bike who evidently requires a full conversation. He talks to the kid for longer than he talked to me.

"He's like that with everyone," Hettie says.