Lumbersexual (Novella) Read online

  TITLE PAGE

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  OTHER WORKS BY THE AUTHOR:

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DEDICATION

  QUOTE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photograph of Joel Pastuszak, book cover model, copyright Cory Stierley, used with permission.

  Original watercolor illustrations by Katie Heckey and Nelson Wells.

  Cover design by Michele Catalano Creative.

  Editing by L Woods LLC.

  Formatting by Shanoff Formats.

  Copyright © 2016 by Leslie McAdam.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Other works by the Author:

  The Sun and the Moon

  The Stars in the Sky

  All the Waters of the Earth

  Acknowledgments

  I am so grateful for everyone in my life, including those who specifically helped with this book:

  Mary Carr, Deb Markanton, Temitope Awofeso, Maxine Donner, Melanie Martin, and Lex Martin provided helpful feedback and encouragement.

  Kristy Lin Billuni, Heather Roberts, and Jerica MacMillan provided editing assistance.

  Nelson Wells, Katie Heckey, Cory Stierley, Joel Pastuszak, Michele Catalano, and Shanoff Formats made it look better.

  My husband and children put up with me and let me do this.

  And everyone in Southwinds Coffee and the Tribe kept me going.

  I love you all.

  For Nelson and Katie, the couple most likely to spend the summer in the woods, and for Kristy and Helen, the least. And for Mary Carr, who saved it.

  “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” — Ernest Hemingway

  My whole life, I’ve been so fucking scared of heights, and it’s a twenty-foot fall straight down into the ravine.

  I find myself here off the map. By myself. Again.

  But he’s down there.

  I have to get him.

  And I can do this. I can do this.

  He helped me find myself. Now I’ve found him.

  I need to save him.

  I’d learned a lot about trust this summer.

  Did I trust myself as much as I trusted him?

  I take a deep breath.

  A helicopter roars over my head, so close that it whips my curls. I’m breathing in acrid smoke. My heart beats so fast I think it’s going to rip out of my chest.

  Not for the first time today.

  I can do this.

  I just need to take the next step.

  “I’m vegan but I eat roadkill.”

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re telling her that. What is she going to think? Maggie just met you!” Gesturing at me, Emma Chen tossed her dark hair, stomped over to a scuffed greige leather ottoman, and plunked herself down. Since she was roughly the size of an average ground squirrel, the amount of noise she made surprised me. She appeared more exasperated and embarrassed than mad, though. I thought I caught some teasing in her chestnut-colored eyes.

  I cocked my head to the side and tried not to burst out laughing at my new friend, Matt Darian. One of my multiple new friends. I mean, I’d just met the guy, and I didn’t want to be rude and laugh at him, but it was hard not to. “That’s . . . different. I’ve never heard of the roadkill diet. How do you justify that on a philosophical level? You don’t eat animals at all, but you make an exception if they’re dead and mangled on the side of the road?”

  His hazel eyes regarded me through clear-rimmed glasses, and he ran a thin hand through his neat blond hair. “You try to get to them while they’re still warm. But yeah, to answer your question, I believe in intentional living, and I don’t believe in waste.”

  This pronouncement silenced all of us for a moment and we stared at him. I surveyed the reaction of the room. Stocky, barrel-chested Ian Thomas—dark hair, dark eyes—let out a breath, grinned, and rolled his head back to look at the ceiling. My eyes followed his to the wooden rafters decorated with spider webs and a fair amount of dust. Yazmin Gutierrez, also dark hair and eyes, registered both repulsion and fascination in equal measure on her pretty face. Blue-haired, brown eyed Katie Nelson looked amused, sprawled on a couch that’d been new at least thirty years ago. Emma frowned at him.

  But it was obvious that Matt’s statement was the truth. Nothing about him made me think of excess or waste—plain white t-shirt, generic jeans, functional tennis shoes. Kinda boring.

  I was still having trouble processing his meal plan. “So, you have skunk for dinner? Possum?”

  “If I can find it, yeah. Most of the time it’s squirrel. Raccoon or deer if I’m lucky.”

  Okay, he wasn’t boring, just weird. Who the hell was I living with?

  “I’m not eating raccoon,” asserted Katie, as she placed her long legs on a beat-up coffee table.

  I bit back another laugh as I sat in the central living room of my new home for the next three months—a large log cabin—on one of three shabby, ugly couches, my feet up next to Katie’s, and looked around. Smooth, oak floors stretched the length of the house. Tall, wavy glass windows framed a view of dusky dark green pine and fir trees. I could see battered outdoor furniture on a back patio and a clothesline off to the side on the forested slope, which ended at the South Fork of the Merced River. Gray river rocks made up the mantel surrounding the cozy fireplace. Too bad it was summer. We’d probably never need it. I loved a crackling flame.

  I turned back to Matt, changing the subject to stop talking about dead animals. “What did you major in?” It felt funny asking the question in the past tense, given that we’d all just graduated last week.

  “Landscape architecture at Davis.” I’d halfway expected him to say taxidermy, but I could picture his precise handwriting without seeing it. Although he came off as odd and somewhat mechanical, my immediate reaction to him was that he seemed friendly enough. Though, I’d rather eat s’mores instead of roadkill when roughing it. Just saying.

  “And where do you work now?”

  “With Ian in the ranger station issuing backpacking permits. We also do backcountry wilderness patrols.”

  Smiling at the word wilderness, a pulse of excitement ran through me. I was looking forward to spending the summer hiking, being out in nature, really getting to experience Yosemite, the national park I’d only ever seen in pictures online, the one I’d always wanted to visit. “That’s so cool. I can’t wait to try backpacking.”

  “There’s nothing like it, knowing that you’re the only one out there for miles and miles and miles. What did you major in, Maggie?”

  “Botany at Cal Poly,” I said. Yazmin, Katie’s roommate both here and in college, wore a colorful Guatemalan tunic and khaki shorts and smelled like patchouli. Burning Man devotee. I turned to her. “And you?”

  “I just graduated with a degree in environmental studies, but I want to be a massage therapist.”

  “So why didn’t you study massage?”

  She rolled her eyes and picked at her nails. “Parents.”

  I hated when that happened. So many of my friends had gone to college to please their parents, or to do w
hat they thought they should do. But not many of us did what we wanted to do.

  Guess I was lucky, in a way. I chose my major—one that I loved—and I didn’t have anyone telling me that I had to do something to please them.

  In another way that sucked, because no one really cared.

  I’d made it on my own, though—paying for my education with scholarships, working, and tutoring others—and I had the piece of paper to prove it. Just got it last week.

  But after this summer, I had no clue what I’d do.

  It was one thing to be in college, because I had focus—the overriding purpose of studying, taking classes, getting good grades. Goal after goal to achieve.

  Now it was another thing to get a job and go out in the real world, work forty years, and then retire in Florida.

  Not that I wanted to do that. Actually, I had a much better idea of what I didn’t want to do than what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be stuck in a lab extracting plant DNA like I’d done for the past four years under carefully controlled growing conditions. I wanted to smell living things, not just use a computer to model how they were supposed to be distributed over the countryside.

  So for now, I had a summer job restoring meadows in Yosemite National Park, and I’d figure out what to do after that.

  I hoped.

  Not a half hour earlier, I’d paid my twenty dollars and entered the park from the south entrance, evergreen trees lining the winding mountain road like tall stacks of books in my college library. As I drove my little 1991 Honda, my golden brown skin prickled with anticipation. I was finally here. I’d thoroughly prepared for this summer by packing brand spanking new hiking boots that I’d attempted to break in the week before, a zero-degree sleeping bag, a for-reals-OMG-I-was-gonna-try-backpacking-this-summer backpack, and a stash of Cheez-Its because I couldn’t live without those.

  Shrug.

  I rolled down the window and let the clean, piney-scented mountain air brush my face and blow my shoulder-length dark brown curls. The Sierra Nevada Mountains smelled different than the lowlands of California’s hot, flat Central Valley that I’d just passed through.

  And what a change from the broad expanses of vibrant green soybeans and tightly planted corn of Iowa where I’d grown up. This jagged mountain landscape was testing my fear of heights.

  As I continued on the winding two-lane highway, I craned my neck and started identifying the trees I’d learned in class—incense cedar, valley oak, ponderosa pine. A branch from a conifer almost hit my passenger side door. I couldn’t wait to see a giant sequoia. Such a rarity.

  Shit, I swerved to avoid missing a deer standing in the bike lane.

  Keep your eyes on the road, Maggie.

  My soon-to-be supervisor, Kristy, had warned me that cell phone service was spotty in the park, so I’d printed out a map to my new home, employee housing in the small community of Wawona, and placed it on the passenger seat for safekeeping. But now I pulled it out, studying my way. I needed to find myself this summer.

  Literally.

  The path to my new home was easier to navigate than life after college where there was no map.

  I turned off the main highway onto a paved side street, followed it back to a small cluster of log cabins in the woods, and parked my car on the pine needle-covered ground on the side of the road. The two-car driveway was quadrupled-parked with a huge, ugly brown van, a gray Toyota truck, a vintage yellow Volvo, and a red Mazda. I turned off my car.

  When I opened the door to get out, my first reaction was wow. I’d never lived in the mountains before. It was . . . quiet. A bird call sounding suspiciously like “Cheeseburger” split the air, and something skittered through the pungent bearbrush to the side of my car. In the distance I heard the rush of water, which I knew to be the Merced. I stepped out of my car, boots crunching dry oak leaves, which lived at this elevation with the pines. #botanynerd.

  But silence.

  Then it was broken when the red door of the log cabin burst open and out spilled a ton of overly enthusiastic people.

  “Maggie!”

  “You must be Maggie!”

  “Roommate!”

  “Welcome!”

  I hadn’t been able to tell who said what, they’d just kept streaming out of the house like water over a dam and I ended up surrounded by almost a half-dozen smiling people who all looked about my age, twenty-one.

  “Hi, everyone,” I said, and waved awkwardly. Only child. Bookworm. Not used to attention. I looked down and kicked at a small white fir branch on the ground. “I’m Maggie Washington.”

  “Yay!” said a tiny girl with killer hiking boots, who waved back at me excitedly and then shoved her hands into her pockets, as if to control her eagerness. “I’m Emma Chen. You’re finally here! You’re staying with me!”

  Everyone gathered around me, and they all said their names and shook my hands.

  “I’m a hugger,” Emma burst out, and reached around and wrapped me in a warm hug.

  “Me too.” I hugged her back.

  I smiled at all my new friends. “Sorry, I’m late. I had to, you know, graduate, pack up my apartment, put my things in storage.”

  “It’s all good, girl,” said Ian, and gave me a chin lift.

  Then they overwhelmed me with offers of assistance. “I’ll get your bags,” volunteered Matt, and he pulled my bag out of my car. In one trip, we took my gear inside and dumped it in my new shared bedroom.

  Now I sat with all of them in the living room, getting to know my new roomies, who’d clearly settled in already. I looked around at the sweatshirts, hiking boots, bicycle helmets, backpacks, flashlights, and lanterns strewn everywhere, wondering if I’d fit in.

  “I don’t have to eat roadkill, do I?”

  “Of course not,” Emma assured me. I got the idea that Matt’s diet was already a household joke. Then changing the subject, she said, “I just graduated like you, and I’m going to medical school in the fall at the University of Chicago. I’ve always wanted to be a pediatrician.”

  “That’s awesome,” I said. “I’m so jealous of people who have goals like that.” I turned to blue-haired Katie. “What about you?”

  “I have a degree in art from the University of San Francisco.” I immediately was drawn to her vibrant brown eyes and perky-but-cool personality. She had killer hiking boots too, like Emma, and a tattoo peeking out under her black t-shirt.

  I loved tattoos. I had one on my ankle of a purple coneflower—an Iowa native plant—with a monarch butterfly.

  The only memory I wanted to take with me of Iowa.

  Botany nerd here loved it.

  “This is the first time for all of us in the park. Katie, Yazmin, and I work in the interpretive program. We give ranger walks in the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias and campfire talks.”

  “What does interpretive mean?”

  “Interpret nature for visitors. You know. Talk to them about ecology. Basically a tour guide for the environment.”

  “Cool.” I smiled at her and turned to Ian, the barrel-chested wrestler. “And you?”

  “I’m from Idaho and I studied environmental engineering at Cal.” His dark eyes flicked up and down my athletic body, with interest, perhaps. I’d have to watch out for him.

  Don’t make assumptions, Maggie.

  “And you work with Matt at the ranger station?”

  “Yep. Live with him. Work with him. But there’s no way in fuck I’m eating squirrel with him.”

  What a crowd. This whole living in a log cabin with a bunch of brainiac granola children was unique. I hadn’t expected to be roughing it this much. No television. Barely any technology. We had a clothesline outside. I wondered if there was a washing machine in the cabin or if we had to beat our clothes on a rock at the river.

  When were they going to get out the record player?

  It was gonna be culture shock to be away from my phone all summer long. And I loved taking pictures, but there was no Wi-Fi. The National Park Ser
vice didn’t have it in its budget to install upgrades for this old house.

  “So,” said Emma. “You know about the party, right?”

  Already? “No. What party?”

  “There are parties every night around here.”

  “Seriously? So who are at these parties?”

  “Rangers. Staff. Locals.” Gesturing to the other roommates, she said, “We’re all new, right? Doesn’t feel like that anymore. After one party you get to know people really quickly.” She grinned. “Even the notorious ones.”

  I had to know. “Who are the notorious ones?”

  “There’s this really hot guy who’s known for getting together with the seasonal staff.” She shook her head. “I’d stay away from him. And there are a few who seem to be pains in the ass. But pretty much everyone is really cool.”

  “Where is it?”

  She shoved a pink half-sheet of paper in my hand. I turned it over and giggle-snorted. It was a used wilderness permit for hiking in the backcountry. Someone had photocopied a flyer for a party on the other side with a crude cartoon of a bear and a ranger drinking beer. “Tonight’s fiesta is at Kristy’s house.”

  “She’s my boss.”

  “Yeah, she’s a ranger supervisor.”

  I read the fine print at the bottom of the invitation. “It says there are rules? No plates, no silverware, and you may not serve yourself? That’s insane.”

  Emma nodded. “I’m bringing seven-layer dip. Come with us. You can meet everyone.”

  “Sounds good.” Then I realized. “All I have to bring are Cheez-Its.” My face fell.

  Her facial expression started with raised eyebrows then morphed to a wrinkled nose. “Between Matt’s roadkill and those, we’ll have to come up with something better for meals after this party. We’ve decided to pool together our money and buy food for the house. You in?”

  “Sounds great.”

  “We have some time before the party,” she continued, looking at her watch. “Want to unpack? I’ll help.”