Page 2 of Autumn With The Grumpy Mountain Man

I typed back, Made it! Town is adorable. Love you too! I didn’t answer the rest.

I unlocked the car and set the books on top of the bags I’d crammed into the passenger seat. The door stuck when I tried to close it. I gave it a hip check, and it shut.

The workshop sat at the end of a gravel road that climbed for two miles past mailboxes and then nothing. I’d practiced what I was going to say to him the whole way from Asheville. By the second switchback, I’d forgotten all of it.

It was an old barn, red once, with the big doors on the front rolled all the way open. I parked beside a dusty pickup, wiped my palms on my jeans, and got out.

Inside, it smelled like sawdust and wet paper. I stopped just past the doors and stared.

I’d seen the photos. The photos didn’t come close.

It was a pumpkin, or the bones of one, at least twelve feet high. Strips of wood curved up from a base the size of my car and met at the top in a crown of wire. Light from the high windows fell through the ribs and made stripes on the floor.

A man stood near the top of a ladder with a staple gun in his hand.

“Mr. Tate?”

He fired a staple into the wood.

“Hi,” I tried again. “I’m Hazel Parker. Your intern.”

“I know who you are.”

He finished the row before he came down. He didn’t hurry. His flannel sleeves were shoved up to his elbows, and his forearms were streaked white with something that had dried there. When he reached the floor and turned around, he was taller than I’d expected and a lot younger than I’d pictured. He had dark stubble along his jaw and gray-blue eyes, and he looked at me like he was deciding whether I was worth the trouble.

My heart did something it had no business doing.

“I’m so happy to be here,” I said, and then I couldn’t seem to stop. “I wrote an entire research paper on your work. Well, it was supposed to be about Appalachian folk art in general, but it ended up being mostly about you. Not you. Your pumpkins.”

“Deb told me.”

“Oh.” My face went hot. “Good. That’s good.”

“I told her I didn’t need any help.”

Dr. Deborah Mills had warned me about this part.

“She said you’d say that.” I held out my hand. “She also said you owed her.”

He looked at my hand for a second before he shook it. His palm was rough and warm, and he let go fast.

“She tell you what for?”

“No.”

“Good.”

He set the staple gun on a workbench and crossed his arms. “Here’s the job. You’ll sand. You’ll mix paste. You’ll haul. None of it goes in a portfolio.”

“Great.”

He frowned, as if that were the wrong answer.

“I’m serious,” I said. “I want to learn how you do this. All of it.”

“You’ll learn how to sand.”

“Then I’ll learn how to sand.” I hitched my bag higher on my shoulder. “Where should I put my things? Dr. Mills said housing was taken care of.”