A Virgin River Christmas (Virgin River #4)(46)

“I remembered the place. I’d come up here fishing with my dad when I was a kid. Before my mom died; before he lost interest. I first came when I was young, then as a teenager. I just remembered it as a place you could hear yourself think. I needed something like that—something low stress. And you admitted yourself, it’s really beautiful.”

“And it just turned into over four years?”

“It just did,” he said. “Something I learned in the Marines—it works for me to challenge myself physically. Push myself. It gives me a look at who I am, what I can do. I was living off the land, roughing it. And I was starting to think clearly. I came up in late summer. I had a bedroll and backpack. Back then, I thought it might be best if I stayed away from people for the most part—thought some things through, tried to get a handle on the ways my life was changed since the Marine Corps. Then all of a sudden, it was snowing and I wasn’t quite ready to take the next step. There were options—the GI bill and school, a job, whatever. But I wasn’t ready, and the old man, Raleigh, kicked me back to life. Before I knew it, I’d lived with him for months—like two old bachelors going their own way, doing their own thing. Then I was taking care of him, then he was dead. By then, I had a routine and a lifestyle. It was working for me.”

“But you didn’t have friends…”

“Yeah, I didn’t seem to need people. I swore I’d never let that happen. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Huh?”

He didn’t respond for quite a long, drawn out moment. Finally he said, “My dad. When my mom died, I was twenty and had been in the service a couple of years. She’d been sick with cancer. She was only fifty-five, but she’d had a hard fight for about three years. She was ready, but my old man wasn’t. It really aged him and he was so pissed off. I mean more pissed off than he had been. He’s never been what you’d call happy. He isolated himself, lost interest in things he used to like, slowly left what few friends he had. Every time I came home on leave, he was a little worse. I kept thinking he’d snap out of it, but he didn’t. I swore that that would never happen to me, no matter what.”

“And it did?”

“Not the way you think. I’m not angry. Not very, anyway. I just turned into a loner because my life was mostly spent alone.”

“But don’t you ever want more? I mean, like friends? A shower? An indoor john? A full set of dishes?”

He turned and grinned at her. “I have given some thought to the idea of a shower—it’s a pain in the ass hauling water. But we mountain men, we don’t need a lot of baths.”

“Don’t you want a TV? A CD player? A computer?”

“See if you can understand this. I want trees that are three hundred feet tall, black bear that poke around my stuff, deer that eat out of my hand, and a view that almost brings me to my knees every morning. I want to work just hard enough to afford my life. I’m sorry I don’t have an indoor john and shower for you, especially while you’ve been sick, but I don’t really need one.”

She turned toward him and put a hand on his arm. “Aren’t you just a little worried you could turn out like that old guy you took care of? Alone on a mountain for fifty years?”

“I’ve thought about it a time or two,” he said. “I plan to keep going to the dentist at least once every other year—I’d like to go out with all my own teeth. Old Raleigh couldn’t eat much that wasn’t soft. But in all other ways, he didn’t have a bad life.”

“Okay, wouldn’t you rather have a better way to earn money than selling firewood?”

He shot her a surprised look. “I don’t sell wood because I’m poor and stupid—I sell wood because it’s good money. The trees are free. There’s no mark-up. I like cutting ’em down and chopping ’em up. I work at it year-round and make a lot of money when I sell the cut and split logs. I work for the furniture mover in spring and summer, while business is heavy for him. It lets me tend the garden and fish, not to mention get ahead on winter firewood—it has to be seasoned for six months. The river up here is pure and deep. The fish are fat and delicious. It’s incredible. Listen, if I needed anything more, I’d work more.”

“No regrets then?” she braved.

He snorted. “Marcie, I have lots of regrets. But not about how I live or what I do.”

She chewed on her lip for a moment. Then she coughed until it bent her at the waist.

“This truck is too cold for you,” he said. “We shouldn’t have gone to the bar—we should’ve gone home. You get straight to the couch when we’re home. Cough medicine and bed.”

She took a breath. “Do you regret leaving Shelly?”

He glared at her for a moment, putting her on notice that she was getting too close to that forbidden territory again. But to her surprise, he answered. “It didn’t go exactly that way. I’m not sure who left who.” And then he fixed his eyes ahead again and started up the mountain to his cabin.

“But she said—”

His head jerked back to her. “You talked to her?”

“I was trying to locate you,” she said weakly, like the wimp she’d suddenly become.

“Okay, this conversation will have to wait. No more.”