Page 75 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

The man is kind about it. His name is on his lanyard and his coffee is on a hot plate and he offers me some and I take it, and it is the best thing I have put in my body in seventeen days, and he says, "For what it's worth, that cut was garbage," and then his eyes go to the corner of the trailer where there is no camera and he adds, "Off the record."

"Nothing here is off the record."

"No," he agrees. "Sign here."

They put me in a transport at six. Nobody comes out to the lot. Junie is nine miles up a ridge in a rock shelter with a string of alder curls hanging over her and I have left her asleep under it, and there is no arrangement of words available to me that makes that anything other than what it is.

At the staging town they give me my truck out of a lot behind a motel, and I stand in that lot for a while with the keys in my hand.

Then I drive north for four hours.

The house comes up on the left after the second bridge, and the second bridge is mine.

I built it eleven years ago for the county, forty-one feet of clear span over Hollow Creek with a queen post truss and a deck of two-inch fir, and I take it at fifteen miles an hour the way I always do, and the deck says what it always says, which is nothing, which is the highest compliment a structure pays.

Then the drive, and the gravel, and the house.

Gray cedar shingle gone silver. Two courses missing off the north face where the wind takes it. A tarp on the back slope that has been there for two winters, blue, gone chalky and brittle at the edges where the sun has taken it apart, held down with three sandbags and a length of chain, and I am the man who put it there and I am also a timber framer with a shop full of tools and there is a whole speech in that tarp that I have never said out loud.

The kitchen light is on. It is ten in the morning. The kitchen light is always on.

Vessik is at the table with a mug and a folded newspaper, and she is eighty-four years old and four foot eleven and she takes one look at me coming through her door at ten in the morning seventeen days into a twenty-one day television program and says:

"You look like a coat rack."

"Good morning."

"Sit down before you fall over. There's bread."

There is bread. There is bread and a slab of butter and a jar of the pickled beans she has made every fall since before my father was born, and I sit down at that table and eat like an animal for six or seven minutes while she says absolutely nothing, and when I finally stop she pours me a coffee and pushes it across and sits back down.

"Now," she says. "Talk."

Upstairs there are four buckets in the hall.

I go up before I talk, because a man should look at the actual problem before he opens his mouth about anything, and the hall is exactly as I left it in the spring. Four buckets on the runner, spaced along the line where the ridge is failing, and the runner is going black under them, and the plaster on the north wall has a stain shaped like a state.

The one at the end has three inches of water in it. It has not rained in two days.

I go down and put my hands on the kitchen wall under the window where the sill is, and I do not have to do anything clever. My thumb goes into it. The wood takes my thumb like a wet cake.

"Six years," I say.

"About that."

"It has moved since spring."

"Everything's moved since spring," Vessik says. "Sit down."

I tell her all of it. It takes forty minutes and she does not interrupt once, which from her is a thing.

I tell her about the drop and the tarp upside down and the fifteen days and the trestle-word. I tell her about a woman who reads a room the way I read a joint and cannot start a fire. I tell her about the filter and Deet Arbogast and the burden and the three days with no food. I tell her about the elk, because it is Junie's to tell and I tell it anyway, to one person, in a kitchen, and I will answer for that later.

I tell her about the forty-one thousand dollars.

"I forfeited it," I say. "The clause takes both fees. Hers too. I walked at six twelve yesterday morning and I did not wake her to ask."

Vessik turns her mug around on the table.