Moe Sorrentino, 62, spent the first three hours of his niece’s graduation cookout leaned against the gnarled trunk of a 100-year-old white oak, sipping sweet tea spiked with two fingers of bourbon and doing his best to pretend Lila Marlow didn’t exist. He’d avoided every family gathering for 22 years for exactly this reason—couldn’t stand the sight of the woman he’d blamed for his wife Elaine’s hiking accident, the one he’d convinced himself had talked Elaine into that solo trek on the icy Blue Ridge trails back in 2001. He’d only shown up today because Mia, Elaine’s goddaughter and the only kid from his old woodshop classes that still sent him Christmas cards, had showed up at his workshop three days prior, held up a hand-carved desk she’d built for her dorm, and refused to take no for an answer.
He’d watched Lila all afternoon from the shade, surprised by how little she resembled the loud, reckless 36-year-old he remembered. At 58, her sun-streaked brown hair was streaked with silver at the temples, pulled back in a loose braid that fell over one shoulder, and the hem of her white tank top was smudged with cadmium blue paint, leftover from the watercolor landscapes she sold at the local farmers’ market now that she’d moved back to the area after 20 years in Oregon. She flipped burgers on the charcoal grill with one hand, swatting Mia’s boyfriend away from the potato salad bowl with the other, and when she laughed at a bad joke from Elaine’s older brother, the corners of her eyes crinkled in a way that felt weirdly familiar, like a song he’d forgotten he knew.
She was halfway across the yard to him before he could duck around the oak, holding a paper plate stacked high with a cheeseburger, baked beans, and a scoop of the coleslaw Elaine used to make every Fourth of July. She stopped six inches from his boots, closer than most people dared get to him these days, and he caught a whiff of lavender hand cream and wood smoke that tangled with the charcoal fumes in the air, made his chest tight for a reason he couldn’t name. Her forearm brushed his when she handed him the plate, the callus on her wrist from holding paintbrushes rough against the sunburned skin of his arm, and he didn’t step back.
“I have something for you,” she said, and her voice was lower than he remembered, softer, no trace of the sharp edge he’d associated with her for decades. He tensed, ready to tell her to save it, to get back to the grill, to leave him alone, but he glanced past her and saw Mia watching from the porch, grinning like she knew something he didn’t, so he nodded, took a bite of the burger to give himself an excuse not to talk.
She pulled a crumpled envelope out of the pocket of the flannel shirt tied around her waist, the paper soft and faded from being folded and unfolded a hundred times. It was Elaine’s handwriting, he’d know that looping scrawl anywhere, addressed to him, postmarked the day before she left for that hike. “She left it on my kitchen counter the night before she left,” Lila said, and her voice wavered a little, she didn’t look away from his face, hazel eyes flecked with green bright even under the dappled shade. “I tried to talk her out of going, told her the trails were too icy, that she should wait till you could go with her. She wrote that letter to you because she said you’d been pulling away ever since the school cut the woodshop budget, that she needed a few days alone to figure out how to talk to you about it. I’ve carried it to her grave every month for 22 years. Didn’t know how to give it to you, you wouldn’t even answer my calls.”
Moe’s hands shook so bad a drop of bourbon spilled from his cup onto the letter. He sat down on the rotting picnic table bench behind him, Lila sitting down next to him so their knees brushed through the thin fabric of their jeans, and read it twice, the words blurring behind the tears he hadn’t let fall since the day the park rangers called him. All those years of anger, of hatred, of hiding in his workshop sanding fly rod blanks till his hands were raw, and it had all been a lie he’d told himself to avoid feeling guilty for how distant he’d been from Elaine those last few months.
He looked up at Lila, and she was crying too, silent tears rolling down her cheeks, and when she reached out to brush a crumb of burger off his chin, her palm warm against his stubbled jaw, he didn’t flinch. They sat there for ten minutes, not talking, listening to the old George Strait song playing low on the porch radio, the one Elaine and Lila used to sing at the top of their lungs on road trips to the beach, and when they both reached for the same napkin to wipe their faces, their fingers tangled for two full seconds before they pulled away, the electric hum of that contact lingering on Moe’s skin long after.
“Mia said you build custom fly rods now,” Lila said, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand, a small, tentative smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “I’ve been wanting to learn to cast ever since I moved back. All the streams out west were too crowded.”
Moe nodded, tucking the letter into the inside pocket of his waxed canvas work vest, right next to the small sanding block he carried everywhere. “I got an extra rod I built last month, fits someone your height perfect. I’m heading out to the Davidson River at 7 a.m. tomorrow. If you’re not late, I’ll teach you.”
She stood up, brushing crumbs off her jeans, and winked at him, the kind of playful, teasing gesture that made his stomach flip in a way he hadn’t felt in 20 years. “I’ll bring coffee. Black, no sugar, I remember how you take it.”
He watched her walk back to the grill, the blue paint smudge on her tank top glowing bright in the late afternoon sun, and ran his thumb over the faint blue paint mark she’d left on the edge of his paper plate.
