Elias Voss, 53, retired forest fire spotter, had spent the last three years avoiding every small-town event west of the Continental Divide that required making small talk with people who’d ask how he was holding up. His biggest flaw? He’d rather camp alone in a snowbank than admit he was lonely. He only showed up to the Kootenai Creek Fall Festival that night because his old fire crew buddy left six voicemails threatening to tow his pickup off his mountain property if he bailed again.
He hovered at the edge of the bar’s outdoor patio, black IPA in one chapped hand, work boots caked with pine resin crunching on fallen sugar maple leaves. The air smelled like roasted chestnuts and diesel from the food truck, bluegrass band sawing through a fast fiddle tune so loud the string lights strung between the pine trees hummed in time. He was halfway to finishing his second beer, planning his escape back to his off-grid cabin, when he saw her.
Clara. His late wife’s former sister-in-law, the woman he hadn’t seen since the funeral three years prior, leaning against the food truck counter laughing so hard she snort-laughed, spiced cider sloshing over the rim of her paper cup onto her heathered burgundy sweater. He froze. He’d always thought she was off-limits, even when he’d watched her roll her eyes at her then-husband’s dumb drunk jokes at family camping trips back in the 2000s, even when his wife had muttered more than once that Clara deserved way better than her deadbeat little brother.
She spotted him before he could duck behind the portable fire pit. She wiped cider off her sleeve with the back of her hand and walked over, boots tapping across the wooden planks of the patio, until she was close enough that he could smell vanilla lotion mixed with cinnamon from her cider over the smoke of the fire. Her shoulder brushed his when she leaned in to yell over the fiddle tune, her lips almost grazing his ear. “I knew that was you. You still wear that same ratty plaid you had on the Yellowstone camping trip in ‘07?”
He stared, mouth half-open, before he found his voice. “You’re in Montana? I thought you were still in Boise.” She shook her head, held out a warm peeled chestnut she’d pulled from the paper bag tucked under her arm. Their fingers brushed when he took it, callus on her index finger from turning library book pages catching on the rough skin of his knuckle, and he felt a jolt hot enough to match the fire at his back. Guilt twisted tight in his chest first—this was wrong, she was family, he shouldn’t be feeling anything but platonic warmth for her—then a sharper, brighter hunger he’d thought died with his wife.
He tried to step back, bumped his heel on the edge of the fire pit, and she laughed, the sound lighter than he remembered. She told him she’d left her husband two years before Elias’s wife passed, didn’t tell anyone in the family because she didn’t want the drama, moved to Kootenai Creek six months prior to run the tiny town library part time. “I always liked it up here,” she said, tilting her head up to look at him, dark eyes catching the gold glow of the string lights. “You were the only one in the whole family who never treated me like a stupid kid who married into the clan, you know that?”
He didn’t know what to say, so he took a bite of the chestnut, sweet and starchy and warm on his tongue. She admitted she’d had a crush on him back then, used to look forward to family trips just to hear him tell stories about spotting lightning strikes from the fire lookout tower 10,000 feet up. He admitted he’d thought about her too, more than he ever should have, but never would have acted on it, thought it was a betrayal of everyone he cared about.
The band slowed down, started playing a wobbly slow cover of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” and she held out her hand, silver rings glinting in the firelight. “You dance?” He shook his head automatically, said he hadn’t danced since his wife’s 40th birthday, 10 years prior. She wiggled her fingers, smiled so the little dimple in her left cheek showed. “C’mon. Nobody’s watching. Half the people here are too drunk on spiked cider to remember their own names tomorrow.”
He took her hand. She was smaller than he remembered, her head coming up just to his shoulder when she stepped close, her free hand resting light on his waist, his hand on her hip. The wool of her sweater was softer than he expected, fuzz catching on the rough edge of his flannel sleeve. For a second she rested her head on his chest, and he could feel her breath warm through the fabric, the steady thud of her heart matching the beat of the song. The guilt faded, slow, replaced by something softer, something he’d thought he’d never get to feel again: the quiet thrill of being seen, of not being alone.
When the song ended, she pulled back, tucked a strand of hair streaked with silver behind her ear. “I have to walk my border collie back to my cottage a few blocks from here. I picked up a stack of vintage 1970s fire lookout postcards at the thrift store last week. You wanna come see them?”
He hesitated for half a second, glancing at the dark mountain road leading back to his empty cabin, the quiet that had wrapped around him like a blanket for three years. Then he nodded, picked up her half-empty cider cup from the table beside them to carry for her, his elbow brushing hers as they turned toward the sidewalk. The sound of the band faded behind them, crickets chirping in the dry grass along the curb, the moon hanging low and orange over the pine trees.
