Ray Voss, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service hotshot crew lead, leaned against the split-rail fence bordering his front yard, cold Coors Banquet sweating through the cuff of his faded fire crew flannel. He’d shown up to the neighborhood block party only because his next door neighbor had begged, said the HOA had tried to shut the whole thing down over noise complaints and he needed bodies to prove the community wanted it. Ray held grudges like he held a chainsaw during fire season: firm, unyielding, no room for negotiation, and that flaw had kept him from speaking to his late wife Lori’s younger sister Marnie for 14 full years, ever since he’d assumed she’d bailed on Lori’s final weeks of ovarian cancer treatment to take a work trip to Europe. No one had ever corrected him, not until three weeks prior, when his mother-in-law had let slip Marnie had been in inpatient rehab for prescription painkiller addiction after a near-fatal car crash, too ashamed to let anyone know, too wrecked to face the sister she’d idolized her whole life.
The air hummed with the buzz of tiki torches, the thud of cornhole bags against plywood boards, the high shriek of kids chasing each other with melting cherry popsicles. The smell of charcoal-grilled brats and sauerkraut hung thick, sweet and sharp, when he spotted her. Marnie was 52 now, auburn hair streaked with threads of silver pulled back in a messy ponytail, wearing cut-off denim shorts and a faded 1995 Tom Petty tour tee, a smudge of charcoal streaked across her left forearm where she’d been helping the grill master flip burgers. She spotted him at the same time, paused mid-laugh at something a neighbor had said, and started walking over.
He tensed, fingers tightening around his beer can so hard the aluminum dented a little. She stopped close enough that he could smell coconut sunscreen and the fizz of cherry seltzer from the can in her hand, no perfume, no frills, same as she’d always been. She held out a hand, calloused at the index and middle finger from holding dog grooming shears 10 hours a day at the shop she ran in Portland, and when he took it, the rough edge of her callus brushed the scar on his palm from a chainsaw mishap in 2011, sending a jolt up his arm he hadn’t felt since Lori was alive.
They made small talk first, awkward at first, then looser, as a group of teens dragged a bluetooth speaker over and started playing old John Mellencamp tracks loud enough to rattle the fence posts. She told him about the 12 golden retrievers she’d groomed the week prior, all from the same litter, all covered in burrs from a camping trip. He told her about the custom dining table he was building for a family down the street, the oak he’d milled himself from a tree that had fallen in last winter’s ice storm. They reached for the same bag of salt and vinegar chips sitting on the fence post between them at the same time, their knuckles knocking, and she laughed, the corners of her eyes crinkling exactly the way Lori’s used to when she found something stupidly funny.
The twist in his gut was sharp, half disgust, half something warmer he refused to name. This was wrong, he told himself. She was Lori’s sister, he’d hated her for more than a decade, the kind of taboo that would make old aunts whisper at family dinners, that would make the guys at the VFW hall nudge each other and make snide comments. But when she brought up Lori unprompted, voice softening, said she still had the hand-knit wool scarf Lori had made her for Christmas 2007, wore it every single winter even when it got full of dog hair, his throat went tight. She apologized, quiet, said she’d been too cowardly to tell him the truth back then, too ashamed of how far she’d fallen, thought he’d never even give her the time of day if he knew what she’d done.
The sun dipped below the oak trees lining the street, painting the sky streaks of pink and tangerine, as neighbors started lighting cheap sparklers, the fizz of their sparks mixing with the sound of crickets starting to chirp. She leaned in a little, shoulder brushing his, and he didn’t pull away. “I’m in town for the next two months, helping Mom move into the assisted living place,” she said, picking at the label on her seltzer can, not meeting his eye for the first time all night. “I was hoping we could… I don’t know. Catch up. Properly. No more grudges, no more lies.”
His brain screamed for him to say no, to walk back into his house, lock the door, go back to sanding the table he was working on alone, the quiet life he’d built for himself where he didn’t have to feel anything sharp or new. But he looked at her, at the fleck of gold in her left iris that she’d shared with Lori, at the charcoal smudge still on her forearm, and he lifted his hand, brushed the smudge away with his thumb, his skin lingering against hers for a beat longer than was strictly polite. She looked up, surprised, and didn’t pull away.
He agreed to meet her at the diner on Main Street the next morning, the one Lori used to drag both of them to after Sunday mass, the one that served cinnamon rolls so big they hung over the edge of the plate. She smiled, wide and bright, before turning to walk back to her mom’s car to help load up their cooler, waving over her shoulder as she went.
Ray stood there for another minute, finishing the last of his beer, tossing the empty can into the recycling bin by the fence. He pulled the crumpled photo of him and Lori on their wedding day out of his front jeans pocket, the one he carried everywhere, ran his thumb over her grinning, sunburnt face, and tucked it back in. He turned toward his garage, already mentally clearing the space on his workbench so he could mill a small block of the leftover oak for a custom brush holder for her grooming shears, with a tiny carved dog paw on the handle.
