The Glacier Auction

I'm twenty-seven, I pour beer for a living, and until last Saturday my life had gone beige. Completely beige. Wake up, brew, clean tanks, go home, eat noodles, sleep. Repeat until dead.

The only bright spot on my calendar was the charity auction for the glacier viewpoint. Rodney Carroll runs it every year, and every year Kristen Macdonald shows up and makes the whole crowd feel like the ice might come down the hill and hug them.

Kristen. Forty-six, stunt coordinator, built like she could throw me over one shoulder and the keg over the other. I'd known her five years through these charity things and never once worked up the nerve to say more than pass the napkins.

"So you're going to bid this time," Natasha said to me the Friday before, racking glasses at the brewery. She's twenty-nine, my coworker, sings alto next to me in the community choir, and has zero filter.

"Bid on what?"

"On Kristen's package. The stunt experience thing. Everyone knows you drool over her."

"I do not drool. I... admire, from a respectful distance."

"Monty. You rearranged a whole tank schedule so you'd be free Saturday. I saw the whiteboard."

Busted. She grinned at me and flipped the towel over her shoulder.

"Fine. I'm going to bid. Happy?"

"Delighted. I'll be there too, in case you chicken out."

* * *

Saturday the whole town drove up the gravel road to the viewpoint. Rodney had a canopy and a little stage built right at the rail, and behind him the glacier just sat there being enormous, blue and cracked and old as dirt. Somebody's kid was selling sausage rolls off a folding table. It was the nicest weather we'd had in weeks.

I stood in the back with Natasha while Rodney warmed up the crowd. He's thirty-eight and has the voice of a man who could sell you your own shoes.

"Ladies and gentlemen, next up, fresh off a film shoot that I am legally not allowed to describe..."

Kristen walked up on the platform in jeans and a windbreaker and I forgot how breathing worked for a second.

"This package," she said into the mic, "is one day with me. I'll teach you how to fall off a building onto an air bag, safely, with me spotting you the whole time. Lunch included. I have done this with forty people and only one of them cried, and honestly he deserved it."

Laughter. Rodney opened the bidding at two hundred.

"Two fifty," a voice said beside me. A woman I didn't know, maybe forty, sunglasses, expensive jacket. She had a paddle with a number on it and an expression like she collected things.

"Three hundred," I said, before my brain finished loading.

"Four."

"Four fifty."

"Six."

Natasha dug her elbow into my ribs. "You're already past your budget, I can feel it."

"Seven hundred," I said.

The woman turned and actually looked at me for the first time. "Eight."

"Nine."

"Nine fifty," she said, and I swear her voice got bored.

"Thirteen hundred," I said, and there was a little gasp from somebody, and Natasha made a sound like a kettle.

"Going once," Rodney sang out. "Going twice... sold! To the young man in the brewery shirt!"

The woman with the paddle gave me a small nod, like an opponent in chess, and walked off. I exhaled for what felt like the first time since four fifty.

"I'm not paying that," I whispered to Natasha.

"Yes you are. It's for the glacier!"

* * *

After the auction, most people drifted down to the community hall for the reception, but Kristen was coiling cable by the stage. I hovered for a good minute like an idiot before she noticed me.

"There he is," she said, laughing. "Thirteen hundred dollars. Who were you bidding against? That woman looked like she owned three yachts."

"I don't know her. She had a paddle. Paddles are intimidating."

"You could have just walked up and asked me out for free."

My ears went hot. "That obvious, huh?"

"Monty, you've come to these things five years running and you've never once managed a full sentence at me. Yeah, it's a little obvious." She wound the last coil and stood. "It's also a little charming. So. You won a day with me. What are you going to do with it?"

"Actually," I said, and my mouth went off on its own, "the stunt day is for me, sure, but the package doesn't say anything about tonight. I was going to ask if you wanted dinner. I brought steaks. I brought a skillet. It's in my truck."

She stared at me and then laughed, that big unguarded laugh that made half the crowd turn around.

"You brought a skillet. To an auction. On a mountain."

"I plan ahead."

"You planned ahead to cook me dinner and you only got the nerve to mention it after outbidding a woman in designer sunglasses?"

"When you say it like that it sounds insane."

"It is insane." She was still grinning. "Good insane. Yes. I'll have dinner with you. But we're going to my place, I've got a rented bach down the coast road and there's a fire pit and a view, and you are not cooking for me in a parking lot. And Monty, the stunt day and tonight are two separate things. Nobody owes anybody anything for a paddle."

"Deal."

* * *

The walk to my truck took about four minutes and she spent all of them interrogating me.

"So what's the plan, chef? Steaks, obviously. What else?"

"Potatoes. I wrapped them in foil. There's bread."

"Peasant food. I love it." She walked around to the tailgate while I fished for keys, and I heard her bark a laugh. "Monty. There's a whole skillet back here. A cast iron monster. Did you seriously haul this up a mountain?"

"It's been in the truck since breakfast."

"You're a lunatic." She lifted it with one hand, testing the weight, easy for her, she throws people off buildings for money. "What else do you got planned? Am I being wooed right now?"

"Is it working?"

She set the skillet down and looked at me, and for a second the teasing dropped out of her face and something warmer came in.

"Ask me again tonight and find out," she said.

I drove us down the coast road with the windows cracked, salt air coming in, her arm out the window riding the wind as a golden retriever would. She talked the whole way about a shoot in the Sounds last winter, about a horse that refused to hit its mark, and I mostly just listened and stole looks at her and thought, you idiot, you waited five years for this.

* * *

Her bach was small and weathered gray, perched above a shingle beach, and the fire pit out front had a view straight down the coastline to where the water went silver. She found me a bag of kindling and some old split logs in a lean-to and I got a fire going while she opened the bach up and shouted commentary through the window.

"There's a grill grate hanging in the shed, if you're civilized about it."

"Cast iron doesn't need your grates."

"Ooh, hear that? The skillet speaks."

She came back out with two folding chairs, a folding table, and a bottle opener, and planted herself in a chair with her boots up on a rock while I seared the steaks. I'd brought two bottles of our stout, the dark one we only make in winter, and I cracked one and handed it over.

"Your brewery's stuff?" She took a pull and held it up to the last of the light. "Okay, that's good. That's genuinely good. I expected gas station beer from a man who packs a skillet up a mountain."