Read Online The Mountain Can Wait by Sarah Leipciger - Free Book Online Page A

a small, veneer-paneled room at the back of the foreman’s trailer. Samantha’s voice crackled over the line so that it sounded as though she was laughing. Tom’s landlord, who lived above his basement apartment, had been kept up half the night by the TV on full volume. It was still blaring in the morning, so he let himself in and found Curtis asleep on the floor in front of the box. The boy was with Samantha now, but they still couldn’t find Elka.
    Tom borrowed a truck and was home within hours, kissing his son on the top of his head as he slept in Tom’s own childhood bedroom. When he went to check out the apartment in the morning, he opened the door and Elka was there, sweeping up the crushed, candy-colored cereal that Curtis had spread all over the floor. She stood in the middle of the room, leaned with the broom handle against her cheek, and looked at him, her eyes like magnets. She told him she was pregnant again and that his new beard suited him fine.

9
    After a week of working straight through cold, early mornings that turned into damp and windy days, Tom wanted to give his planters a day off. He announced this at dinner and was given a rough hug by the person sitting next to him. Someone else got up from the table and slapped him on the back. Two planters from Matt’s crew were elected to drive the two-hour round trip, south along the lake, to the Takla Landing outpost to buy beer.
    After he finished eating, Tom headed to the showers with his tool kit. People had been complaining about water pressure. Even in the bush, they said, they expected more than this sad trickle. He checked the connections at the pump and the cables to the nozzles. He was in one of the cubicles when Nix approached him. She lifted the canvas flap, kicked the toe of his boot.
    “Do you ever stop working?” she asked.
    “Eh?”
    “All we ever see of you is the bottom half. Your top bits are always hidden under a hood or behind a tire or something.”
    Tom shrugged, turned his wrench against the nozzle fitting.
    “Will you join the party tonight?”
    He lowered his wrench from the nozzle and looked at her. She had her towel over her shoulder and gripped a plastic soap container in one hand, toothbrush and toothpaste in the other.
    “If I get this done,” he said.
      
    Two fires burned on the beach as the sky above the Skeenas softened to pink and orange, the clouds breaking for the first time in a week. Three people floated in a canoe in the middle of the lake, and from the beach their silhouettes grew darker and darker until they and the canoe were one perfect black form, drifting on the water. Depending on the direction of the wind, every now and then their voices and their laughter echoed through the air, like birds. Tom sat on a flat rock at one of the fires next to Penny with the pink hair. She spit sunflower seeds into the flames and said to no one in particular that after this week, her cold bones ached and she felt like an old woman. Someone else complained that the blisters on his heels were the size of apples. Amy announced that her chafing was already so bad that halfway through the day she’d ripped off her underwear in the middle of the block and wasn’t going to wear any for the rest of the season. They all agreed, though, that for tonight, things were looking up. They had beer and dope and a good fire; the weather was turning and maybe the sun would come out for their day off. Three guys deftly kicked a hacky sack, tossing the dusty bag from the toes of their shoes, the sides of their shoes, their knees, chests. A red Frisbee cruised a smooth and lazy arc against the backdrop of the lake.
    Sweet’s voice carried over from the other fire. He was holding court, telling a story he’d recounted so many times that it was now becoming mythical. And even though pretty much everyone in the circle had heard it before, they sat with their firelit faces toward him. The year before, there had been a heat wave that persisted