Roland Voss, 52, retired wildland fire crew boss, leaned against the splintered edge of the community park picnic table and picked at a loose thread on his frayed work jeans. The July air smelled like charcoal, sweet corn, and the faint sharp tang of pine that clung to every corner of this small Oregon mountain town, still raw from the 2021 blaze that had kept residents from holding public gatherings for three straight years. This Fourth of July picnic was the first big event the town had pulled off since evacuation orders lifted, and the crowd buzzed loud enough to make his jaw tight, an old familiar tic from 22 years of listening for radio calls that signaled a crew was trapped, a wind shift was coming, someone wasn’t coming home. He’d brought his famous hickory-smoked brisket, the recipe he’d honed over decades of camp cooking on fire lines, and left the tray on the shared food table an hour earlier, planning to slip out before the fireworks started. He hated fireworks. The booms sounded too much like trees exploding in a firestorm, the bright flashes too close to the orange glow of a blaze cresting a ridge.
He was reaching for his truck keys when a shadow fell across the table, and he looked up to see Lila Marquez, his next door neighbor of three months, holding a chipped ceramic dish heaped with peach cobbler, the edges of the crust still glistening with butter. They’d only ever waved across the fence before, him coming home covered in sawdust from fixing up his cottage, her carrying armfuls of library books to her hatchback, since she worked as the head librarian at the town’s tiny public branch. She’d brought him a jar of homemade pickles when she moved in, he’d fixed her split fence post two weeks ago when a pine branch fell during a thunderstorm, and that was the extent of their interactions.
“Figured I’d corner you here instead of chasing you down across the fence,” she said, grinning, and sat down on the bench next to him, close enough that he could smell coconut sunscreen and the soft vanilla of her perfume over the charcoal fumes. Her knee brushed the outside of his jeans when she shifted to set the cobbler dish down between them, and he froze for half a second, so unused to casual, intentional physical contact after eight years of living alone, ever since his ex-wife had left because she couldn’t stand the six month stretches of him being gone every fire season, the constant waiting for a knock at the door that would bring bad news.
She held his gaze when he mumbled that the fence post was no big deal, her dark eyes crinkling at the corners. “You say that, but I was this close to paying a handyman 200 bucks to fix it. Saved me a fortune. This cobbler’s the least I can do.” She nodded at the half-empty tray of brisket sitting a few feet away. “Heard everyone’s losing their mind over that meat you brought. You holding out on a serving for the neighbor who brought you dessert?”
He huffed a laugh, reached for a paper plate, and when he passed it to her their fingers brushed. The contact was light, accidental, but he felt a jolt run up his arm, the same kind of sharp, warm buzz he used to get when he was 20 and a girl he liked leaned across a bar to pass him a beer. He hadn’t felt that in so long he’d forgotten what it felt like. Part of him wanted to pull away, to make some excuse about having to get home to feed his old hound dog, to retreat back to the quiet, predictable loneliness he’d built for himself. He was rough around the edges, had a scar running all the way up his left forearm from a 2019 blaze outside Bend, still slept with a fire radio on his nightstand out of habit, still flinched every time a car backfired on the main road. He wasn’t the kind of guy nice, soft librarians brought cobbler to. But the other part of him, the part that had been quiet for so long he’d thought it was dead, wanted to stay. Wanted to hear her laugh, to taste the cobbler, to see if her hand felt as warm as it had when their fingers brushed.
The first firework went off then, a deafening boom that shook the picnic table, and he flinched so hard his elbow knocked over his can of lemonade, the sticky liquid pooling across the wood. He tensed, embarrassed, ready to mumble an apology and bolt, but she didn’t laugh. She didn’t even make a joke about skittish old guys. She just reached out, rested her hand lightly on his forearm, right over the edge of his scar, and her palm was warm through the thin cotton of his work shirt. “My little brother’s a fire crew boss down in California,” she said, soft enough that only he could hear her over the next boom. “Flies off the handle every Fourth of July. I keep a pair of noise canceling earbuds in my purse just for him.” She pulled a small black case out of her crossbody bag, popped it open, and handed him one of the buds.
He took it, his fingers brushing hers again, and this time he didn’t pull away. He put the earbud in, and the sharp boom of the fireworks softened to a low, distant thrum, mixed with the soft old Miles Davis track she had playing on her phone, piped through both their buds. They sat there like that for the rest of the show, their knees still touching, passing the cobbler dish back and forth between them, watching pink and blue and gold bursts paint the dark sky above the pine trees. He didn’t think about leaving once.
When the last firework faded and the crowd started cheering, she stood up, brushing grass off her linen skirt, and nodded toward the street where their houses were a two minute walk apart. “I got a bottle of peach bourbon sitting on my kitchen counter,” she said, grinning, and tucked the other earbud back into her case. “Figured we could finish the cobbler there, if you don’t have anywhere else to be.”
He nodded, picked up the half-empty cobbler dish and the leftover plate of brisket he’d set aside for her, and followed her down the dark sidewalk, their shoulders brushing every few steps, the sound of distant laughter fading behind them as they turned onto their quiet street.
