The Mountain Can Wait Read Online Free PDF Page B

she sat between his legs and leaned her back against him, and they moved on to the chocolate and rum, passing the bottle back and forth.
    Sniffing the bottle rim, he said, “It tastes like flowers.”
    She twisted around and licked the underside of his top lip.
    They drank a quarter of the bottle and he stumbled into the bush to take a piss, shivering and feeling his way in the dark. This was how they were together, secret nights under darkness, enough food for one, maybe two meals. Always the necessity for blankets, bug spray, pocketknives, and candles. During the long winter months, when she wasn’t teaching at the university, he sometimes took her to a cabin that belonged to a guy he knew from town, and she would read her books in a chair by the window.
      
    They met because she popped a flat tire on her neglected bike, riding out of town along River Road. Through the window of his truck, he saw a woman in boots and a blue dress pushing a bike, with a deflated inner tube around her neck. She had a secondhand patch kit in her bag, one she had been given by an old boyfriend. She opened the grimy plastic box and handed the contents to Tom one by one. All it contained was a crumpled aluminum tube of rubber solution gone hard, a worn piece of chalk, a soft square of sandpaper, and a tire lever. But not a single patch.
    “It’s just too easy,” she said to Tom, as he loaded her bike onto the bed of his truck.
    He looked at her.
    “No patches in the kit. You would understand if you’d met my ex.”
    She was fifteen years younger than him, and he was impressed, and always pleased, by her ability to point out stuff like that, the meaning of a small strip of rubber. She could see how things connected; she once told him she believed there was something on the other side of life that held it all together, like a river. And if you let yourself go along with it, you would never be afraid, or baffled, or alone. He wasn’t sure what to make of all that, but as far as he could tell, she was never any of those things.
    They ran into each other a few weeks after he first drove her and her flat tire home.
    “Still taking your chances with that thing, eh?” he said, nodding at the same bike. He had come out of the drugstore, and she was there on the corner, straddling the bike with one foot on the road. A sun-shower had just fallen, freeing the smell of concrete from hot summer pavement.
    “Indeed I am,” she said, smiling as though she was happy to see him too. “Yep.” She patted the handlebars.
    He shifted his weight from left foot to right, stroked his chin, and puckered his lips, mock-serious. He hunched down on his knees and squinted at the bike’s components. “Could use a new chain. Chain rings and sprockets need to go too. Your brake pads are shot to hell, the cables…Tires are bald. You could kill yourself riding this here cycle.”
    She shrugged. “Still here.”
    He looked at his watch. “Have you got some time today?”
    He took her to Canadian Tire to buy new parts and then back to her place, the rented ground floor of a house near the university. She pulled at the grass and dandelions on the lawn and drank bottles of Kokanee while he stripped her bike frame and fit the new parts. She told him about her family back in Montreal, her work at the university. Told him—and at first he thought she was joking, but she wasn’t—about how she’d been married at twenty, divorced at twenty-one.
    He took his time, was meticulous, quiet, and replied to her questions and comments using only his eyebrows and a smile. After the sun went down, after he’d finished with the bike, he left dark smudges of bike grease on her skin.
      
    Inside the tent, they made a nest out of blankets, thermal mats, and sleeping bags. They turned to each other, and like always, he wanted every part of her at once. She was much smaller than he was, and healthy and plump. Her skin was soft but her hands strong and articulate. When they first