I’ve been in town for three weeks, and every day for the last two of them, I’ve talked to Jacob. Jacob has somehow become an important part of my new life here. I don’t know how it’s happened so fast, or why one of us has found a reason to call the other every day, but I’m so thrilled it has. The conversations keep getting longer, too. Longer and more personal, and Jacob seems to be easing into them. At first, he’d been so awkward and so unsure on the phone, and while he still can be occasionally, he seems much more at ease lately. I think, or I hope, anyway, that I’m putting him at ease. I like the idea of that, of Jacob feeling like he can really open up to me.

I think I might even be falling for him.

I know that’s ridiculous. I’ve only seen him in person once, and that hadn’t gone well. It feels crazy, how much I like him, how much I think about him during my day, how much I want to tell him things, hear him laugh, listen to his voice. I wish I could see him in person again or that he would offer to meet up or even take me out. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be the same in person.

I call Jacob as soon as I’m done at the shop, locking the door for the evening and heading home. “Hi,” I say into the phone, a little breathless from a cold wind that hits me as I turn down the street.

“Are you okay?” Jacob asks. His concern makes me smile more than it probably should.

“Just cold,” I say, “it’s windy out tonight.”

“Not up here,” Jacob says, chuckling. “The trees block it, I suppose. Are you headed straight home?”

“I am,” I confirm, thinking about Jacob’s cabin. I know he’s up in the mountains somewhere, but I don’t actually even know how high or how remote he is.

“Good,” Jacob says.

“Good?” I echo.

“That you won’t be out in the cold,” Jacob clarifies, still a touch awkward.  I’ve come to find his gruffness incredibly charming.

“Only while I walk,” I agree. “I’ve got a furnace and a blanket waiting for me.”

“Sounds nice,” Jacob says, then pauses. Although I can’t see him, I feel like he might be shaking his head. “How was your day?”

“Busy but absolutely wonderful,” I say. “How was yours?”

 

“Neither busy nor wonderful,” Jacob says, making me laugh just a little.

“Oh no. What happened?” I ask.

“Eh, just family politics,” Jacob says as another gust of wind makes me shiver. I shake my head. I can’t imagine what it would be like to work so closely with your family that way. I’m sure it would drive you a bit out of your mind at times. My mother teaches second grade, my father is a car mechanic, and my sister is a stay-at-home mom to a nephew I’ve only seen a handful of times. We’re a get-together-on-holidays-and-that’s-about-it sort of family now that my grandparents are gone. Being in business with them seems like it would be an impossible task.

“More secret recipes?” I ask, teasing a little, hoping to make Jacob laugh. I’m delighted when he does.

“Still just the one,” he responds.

“Is it really lost forever? No one knows it?” I ask, shivering. I’m glad I’ll be home in a few blocks. Jacob’s right; it’s much too cold to be out.

“Not a soul. At the time, he was the most popular man on the mountain. People would come for miles and miles around for his whiskey. They say during the Civil War, some people even hid flasks of it in their uniforms to use for cleaning wounds or to steal a sip of liquid courage before going into battle. I don’t know if there’s any truth to that or if it’s all legend. But it was his whole life after he moved here, although he never told my great-grandfather the recipe. He died before my grandfather was old enough to ask for it. Grandpa always said his greatest regret was that he never got it written down,” Jacob says.

“That’s one really closely-guarded secret,” I say, fascinated.

“They say he kept it on him, wrote it down, and carried it with him at all times, but no one has ever found it. If it ever even existed, he was probably buried with it,” Jacob says.

“Not even his wife knew?” I ask, letting myself into my house and breathing a sigh of relief when the warm air washes over me.

“If she did, she never told anyone. She never even talked about it at all, apparently,” Jacob says.

“My grandmother liked to say she had a secret recipe, too,” I say, smiling to myself.

“For chocolate?” Jacob asks, his voice warming me just as much as the little radiator near my couch.

 

“Yes, she used to swear it was top secret, that she could never tell anyone,” I say, laughing. “I used to find the bags of grocery store chocolate chips in the garbage when I was talking the trash out at her house, so I knew she was just melting them down, but I used to wheedle her for the secret anyway. My grandfather never gave her up even after she died. Can you believe it? He’d swear up and down there really was a family secret.”

“Well, it sounds like your grandmother and my great-great-grandfather would have gotten along quite well,” Jacob says, laughing too.

“I’m sure they would’ve,” I agree. “They could’ve thrown the most delicious get-togethers with their recipes.”

“It’s probably good they lived at different times, actually, or they might have gotten along so well that you and I wouldn’t be talking now,” Jacob says in a way that I can’t tell if it’s an attempt at flirtatiousness or just his general edge of awkwardness. I laugh again and flush a little anyway.

“My grandmother was really pretty when she was young,” I say, thinking of the old pictures I’ve seen of my grandparents, barely more than teenagers the day they’d eloped.

“I’m sure she was,” Jacob says. “You must take after her.” He pauses and coughs, clearing his throat. “I mean, I’m sure you must. In a lot of ways.”

“I like to think so,” I say, flushed again at Jacob’s stumble. I’m almost sure that was him calling me pretty, too.  “What about your great-great-grandfather? Any pictures?”

“Only when he was older,” Jacob says. “I’ve never seen a picture of him younger than seventy, so I assume he came out of the womb with wrinkles and a full head of gray hair.”

“I’ll bet he was handsome,” I say, thinking of Jacob’s face on a man from well over a century ago.

Jacob laughs again, and this one sounds just a little nervous. “You think so?” he asks.

“Oh, yes,” I say, pulling a blanket over myself on the couch and grinning. “A big strong mountain man with a top-secret recipe for amazing whiskey? A man of mystery and good business sense? I’ll bet he had half the girls in town fighting over him. Wanting him to – would it have been called courting back then?”

“In some places it still is,” Jacob says, chuckling awkwardly, “but yes, I think it would have been.”

“Then they all wanted him to court them,” I say. “I can just see the girls lining up at his door with home-baked pies and batting eyelashes.”

 

“Maybe you’re right,” Jacob says, laughing again, more at ease this time.

If he was half as handsome as you are, I’m sure I’m spot-on, I almost think about adding, but I’m not sure I’m ready to test the waters just yet. Still, there’s a lightness in Jacob’s voice I haven’t heard before for the rest of the conversation, a teasing banter between us that makes me fall asleep thinking of whiskey and courting and handsome Civil War mountain men as I do.

Jacob would have made for a fine mountain man legend, I think to myself, smiling as I consider it. I think I would’ve wanted to be the first girl in line at his door if I had lived back then myself.