Elroy Voss, 62, retired high-voltage lineman turned custom axe restorer and county trail maintenance volunteer, shows up to the annual northern Michigan fire department chili cookoff ten minutes late, a hand-sharpened felling axe slung over his shoulder as a thank-you gift for the chief, who’d put out a brush fire on his 10-acre property two weeks prior. The canvas tent strung between two gnarled oak trees smells like cumin, smoked pork, and damp wool left over from the morning’s light drizzle. He doesn’t plan to stay longer than five minutes, has a stack of rusted axe heads waiting to be dressed back in his cinder block workshop, until he turns to leave and his shoulder knocks into a woman balancing three paper bowls of chili in one hand and a dog-eared clipboard in the other.
She doesn’t spill a drop, just laughs, a low, warm sound that cuts through the noise of kids yelling over a sack race and the college football game blaring from a portable TV by the beer cooler. Her name is Marnie, she tells him, she’s his next door neighbor’s cousin, in town for the week running her mobile used bookstore out of a converted sprinter van. She’s 58, has silver streaks threading through her deep auburn hair, rolled up the sleeves of her cream cable knit sweater so he can see the constellation of freckles across her forearms and a tiny silver Orion tattoo wrapped around her left wrist. When he apologizes for knocking into her, his calloused thumb brushes the soft skin of her knuckle by accident, and she doesn’t flinch, just holds eye contact with him, her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners like she knows exactly how long it’s been since he talked to a woman he wasn’t related to.
He stays. He grabs a bowl of the spiciest chili on the table, sits next to her on a splintered pine bench while she judges entries, scribbling messy notes about heat level and meat ratio on her clipboard. She teases him for wearing steel-toe work boots to a community cookoff, and he tells her he wears them everywhere, ever since he dropped a 50 pound crossarm on his foot back in 2008 when he was still climbing transmission towers, still has a crooked pinky toe to prove it. She asks to see it, and he laughs, says he’ll show her if she lets him browse the books in her van later. The air inside the tent is warm enough that he can feel the heat of her arm pressed against his through his thick plaid flannel, can smell lavender hand cream mixed with hickory smoke clinging to the ends of her hair. Every time she leans in to ask him a question about the town, her shoulder presses firmer into his, and he has to fight the urge to tuck the strand of hair that keeps falling in her face behind her ear. He feels stupid, like a 16 year old with a crush on the homecoming queen, and a little sick too, a quiet voice in the back of his head reminding him Carol, his wife of 34 years who passed from lung cancer eight years prior, would hate this, that he’s supposed to be done with this kind of giddy, nervous nonsense. But then she snorts at a bad joke he makes about the fire chief’s chili being hot enough to melt winter road tar, and the voice goes quiet.
When the sun starts to dip below the pine treeline, painting the sky streaks of pink and orange, she suggests they walk the short, pine-needle lined trail behind the fire station to get away from the noise. The air is crisp enough that he can see his breath when he exhales, fallen crimson maple leaves crunching under their boots, crickets chirping in the underbrush. She’s telling him about driving her van across the Upper Peninsula last January, getting stuck in a three foot snowbank outside a tiny bar outside Marquette where the bartender let her sleep on the pool table overnight, when she trips over an exposed tree root. He catches her before she hits the ground, his hand wrapped tight around her waist, the soft wool of her sweater warm under his calloused palm. She doesn’t step back when she steadies herself, just looks up at him, her face lit up by the distant golden glow of the tent’s string lights. She leans in first, her lips brushing his, slow, tasting like cinnamon chili and peppermint lip balm. He kisses her back, his other hand cupping the side of her face, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel guilty. He doesn’t feel like he’s betraying anyone. He just feels warm, and present, and alive.
They walk back to the tent ten minutes later, their fingers brushing every few steps when they walk side by side, no one noticing or caring, too wrapped up in their own conversations and the prize announcements for best chili and most creative topping. She gives him her phone number scribbled on the back of a receipt for a beat-up Louis L’Amour western, tells him he can come browse her van’s inventory whenever he wants, and help her load up a stack of kids’ books for the local elementary school the next morning if he’s free. He tucks the receipt into the inside pocket of his flannel shirt, right next to the folded polaroid of Carol he’s carried there since her funeral, and nods. When he gets back to his beat-up 2006 Ford F-150, he pulls the receipt out, runs his thumb over the messy scrawl of her number, and doesn’t even hesitate before typing it into his contacts list.
