Russell Voss, 62, spends 40 hours a week in his sunlit workshop restoring vintage national park maps, his fingers perpetually smudged with archival glue and faint ink stains. He’s avoided the town’s monthly summer craft fair for two years straight, only agreeing to set up a booth this month after his niece begged him to get out of the house, three years to the day after his wife Ellie died from ovarian cancer. His flaw’s so obvious even the local diner waitress teases him for it: he tucks half-smoked cherry pipe tobacco stubs behind his ear even when he’s not planning to light up, a nervous tic he picked up after Ellie got sick, when he’d step outside the hospital for 60-second puffs between chemo rounds.
The fair’s sweltering, 92 degrees with thick humidity that sticks to the back of his neck like a damp washcloth. The air smells like cut fescue, fried Oreos, and the pine wafting down from the ridgeline above town, Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” crackling through the tinny speakers strung between oak trees. His booth is wedged between a guy selling hand-carved walking sticks and Mara Carter’s jam stand, the same Mara who was Ellie’s book club partner, the woman he’s gone out of his way to avoid for 18 months, scared one look at her warm crinkly smile will make the carefully constructed wall around his grief crumble.
He’s reaching for a roll of packing tape under his table when his elbow knocks a full jar of her blackberry jam off the edge of her booth. It shatters on the packed dirt between their tables, thick purple seeping into the dust like watercolor. They both bend to grab the shards at the same time, his calloused knuckle brushing the soft, warm inside of her wrist, and he yanks his hand back like he’s touched a hot stove. She smells like lavender and burnt sugar, the same scent Ellie used to wear when they’d go backpacking for long weekends, and his throat goes tight.
He stammers out an apology, offers to pay for three jars to make up for it, but she waves him off, swatting his arm playfully. The silver hoop earrings she’s wearing catch the sun when she leans in, and he notices she’s wearing a faded 1987 Great Smoky Mountains National Park hoodie, the same year he started working in the NPS map restoration unit. Turns out she was a backcountry ranger there for 12 years, quit after she broke her ankle falling off a trail during a winter search and rescue. They swap stories for an hour during a lull in customers, sitting on folding chairs so close their knees brush every time one of them shifts, her laugh bright enough to cut through the hum of the crowd. He keeps catching himself staring at the tiny scar at the corner of her mouth, and every time he does she smirks, like she knows exactly what he’s thinking.
He’s fighting it every step of the way, a quiet war in his head between the part of him that’s starved for this kind of easy connection and the part that screams he’s betraying Ellie, that he doesn’t get to be happy again. He tries to pull back, excuses himself to go get a soda, avoids her eye when he comes back, but she doesn’t push, just teases him about the pipe stub behind his ear, says it’s a better accessory than the crumpled grocery receipt he had tucked there last week when he ran into her at the hardware store.
The sky goes dark gray fast, no warning, the wind picking up so hard it blows half his loose map prints off the table. Thunder cracks so loud it makes the jam jars rattle, and fat raindrops start pouring down so hard they sting exposed skin. Everyone scrambles to pack up their booths as fast as they can, Mara helping him grab the fluttering maps before they get soaked, her shoulder pressed tight to his as they haul his stack of framed maps to the bed of his beat-up 2004 Ford F-150. They huddle under the truck’s awning when the rain gets too heavy to see through, both soaked to the bone, her thin cotton shirt clinging to her shoulders, strands of wet gray-blonde hair stuck to her forehead.
She looks up at him, water dripping off her eyelashes, and says she’s been waiting for him to stop acting like he’s supposed to spend the rest of his life alone, that Ellie would kick his ass if she saw how he’s been hiding from everyone. He doesn’t say anything for a long second, the rain drumming so loud on the truck roof it drowns out every other sound, then he plucks the half-smoked pipe stub from behind his ear, drops it in the puddle at their feet, and leans in to kiss her. It’s soft, no messy over-the-top passion, just warm, tasting like the lemonade she was sipping earlier, and when she loops her arms around his neck he doesn’t pull away.
The rain lets up 15 minutes later, the sky lightening to soft blue, a faint rainbow stretching over the ridgeline. They drive to the downtown diner, his truck’s AC blowing cold enough to make them both shiver, and he buys her a cup of black coffee and a slice of peach pie. She steals a bite of his cheese fries without asking, and he doesn’t even pretend to be annoyed, noticing the thin scar on the palm of her left hand from an old chainsaw accident, matching the one on his right palm from a falling tree limb in 1992. They compare scars for 20 minutes, laughing so hard she snorts when he tells her about the time he got stuck in a port-a-potty during a thunderstorm at a backcountry work site.
He reaches across the Formica table, laces his calloused fingers through hers, and doesn’t let go when the waitress stops by to refill their mugs.
