She steps up beside him without warning, her shoulder brushing his bicep hard enough he sloshes a little beer down his wrist. He smells vanilla and damp, turned earth before he looks over. She’s five foot six, freckles dusting her nose, sun-bleached streaks in her wavy brown hair, a smudge of gray clay on her left jaw. Her linen shirt is unbuttoned one slot past modest, and she’s wearing paint-splattered denim overalls slung low on her hips. She orders a lime seltzer, pays with crumpled bills from her overalls pocket, then turns to him and grins before he can look away. He blinks, doesn’t recognize her at first, pegs her as one of the new remote work transplants that have been flooding the valley, the ones that call him “sir” when they ask for hiking directions to the hidden waterfall.
She laughs when he just stares, lifting a warm, dust-streaked finger to tap the scar above his eye light enough he barely feels the contact. “Uncle Clay. C’mon. You taught me to fish off the Flathead Lake dock when I was 12. Yelled at me for feeding a chipmunk a Cheeto and it bit my thumb. I still have the scar.” Oh. Lila. Ellie’s niece, the one who’d moved to Portland right after high school, the last time he saw her she had neon pink hair and was yelling at him for enforcing a 10PM curfew when she stayed with them for a summer. He feels his neck heat up fast, because 10 seconds prior he’d been staring at the curve of her lower lip, thinking about how her gold hoop earring glints just right in the late afternoon sun. He stumbles out a greeting, apologizes for not recognizing her, says she looks different.
She leans against the bar beside him, close enough their hips bump every time a group of tourists squeezes past, and says she moved back last month to open a pottery shop in the old feed store downtown. She’s single, she mentions offhand, got tired of Portland’s performative wellness scene, missed the mountains, missed people who didn’t ask if you were “plant-based” before they’d let you sit at their picnic table. He finds himself talking more than he has in months, telling her about the grizzly with two cubs he’d spotted on the backcountry trail last spring, about how the pine trees smell after the first heavy snow in November. She leans in when he talks, elbows on the sticky bar counter, eyes locked on his, doesn’t look away even when the band cranks up the volume for a cover of *Folsom Prison Blues*. She touches his arm three times while they talk: once when he jokes about the new mayor’s terrible combover, once when he mentions Ellie’s birthday is coming up next week, once when she says he was the only grown-up in her family who ever actually listened to her when she was a kid.
He fights the pull the entire time, swinging wildly between giddy, teenage lightness and a thick, roiling guilt that sits heavy in his stomach. This is wrong, he tells himself. She’s Ellie’s niece, 16 years younger than him, everyone in town knows him as her uncle. If anyone sees them standing this close, talking like this, the gossip will spread faster than a summer wildfire. He should leave, go home to his empty cabin, heat up a frozen bean and cheese burrito, watch an old John Wayne western like he does every Saturday night. But he can’t move. Can’t stop looking at the way her tongue darts out to lick lime juice off her lower lip, can’t stop replaying the weight of her hand on his forearm, warm and solid and real, the first non-work, non-friendly pat touch he’s had in years.
The market starts winding down as the sun dips low over the Bitterroot Mountains, painting the sky streaky pink and tangerine. Vendors fold up their booths, kids get dragged to minivans by harried parents, the band starts packing up their guitars. She pulls a crumpled flyer out of her overalls pocket, shoves it into his hand, the paper soft from being folded and unfolded a dozen times. It has the address of her pottery studio scrawled on the bottom, open studio night next Friday. “I made you something,” she says, voice low enough only he can hear, the teasing grin gone, her eyes soft and unapologetic. “A mug, with a grizzly etched on the side. I remembered you used to collect them with Ellie. Come by after closing, so no one’s around. If you want.” He hesitates for what feels like an hour, his mind racing between memories of Ellie’s laugh and the cold quiet of his cabin at 2AM, the way it feels to be seen for the first time in 12 years.
He nods, tucks the flyer into the inside pocket of his flannel, presses his fingers against it like he’s scared it’ll blow away in the breeze. She grins, leans up and presses a quick, warm kiss to his cheek, her vanilla-eucalyptus perfume wrapping around him for a split second before she steps back. She says she’ll see him next Friday, turns and walks toward her booth of hand-thrown mugs and bowls, waving over her shoulder when she gets halfway across the parking lot. He stands there for another 10 minutes, finishing his beer, the spot on his cheek still tingling, watching her fold up her table with the help of a teen volunteer. He pulls the flyer out of his pocket, reads the scrawled address one more time, then tucks it back safely. He turns toward his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150, already mentally clearing a spot on his kitchen shelf next to the three chipped mugs Ellie made him years ago.
