Ronan Hale, 52, makes his living restoring antique maps, his calloused fingers used to carefully peeling brittle paper off rotting backing, smoothing out creases left by decades of being stuffed in sea chests or attic trunks. He’s spent the four years since his wife’s cancer death walling himself off from any new personal connections, preferring the silence of his sunlit workshop outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to the forced pleasantries of small-town events, often tucking a tattered 1972 road atlas under his arm to bury his face in if anyone tries to strike up unplanned chat. He only agreed to hit the weekly farmers market that humid July morning because his sister begged him to grab the last jar of wild blackberry jam the Amish vendor sells before it sells out.
He’s halfway to the jam stand when he sees her. Elara Voss, 48, the woman who moved into the old one-room schoolhouse three miles down the road from his workshop three months prior, the one he’s gone out of his way to avoid making eye contact with every time he’s driven past her sage-green vintage book truck parked on the side of the highway. She’s reaching for the exact same jar of jam he is when he gets to the table, their knuckles brushing hard enough that he jolts back like he touched a live wire, dropping his atlas on the dirt at their feet.
She kneels to grab it before he can, her sun-warmed forearm brushing the denim of his jean-clad knee when she stands back up, and he catches a whiff of her perfume: lavender, old paper, and a faint hint of campfire smoke. He can see the flecks of silver in her dark curly hair near her temple, the smudge of indigo ink on her left thumb, the tiny scar at the corner of her mouth when she smiles and holds the atlas out to him. He stares at the page she’s paused on, a folded map of 1920s Cape Cod he’d marked a week prior when he was restoring a 1918 nautical chart of Nantucket Sound for a client in Boston.
“I used to summer there as a kid,” she says, nodding at the map, and before he can think of an excuse to leave, he’s telling her about the chart, about the drunk sailor’s scribbled notes in the margins claiming he’d buried a crate of rum on a tiny unmarked sandbar off Martha’s Vineyard. The jam vendor, an older man named Eli who’s known Ronan since he was a kid, snorts and grabs two small empty mason jars from under the table, splits the last jar of jam evenly between them, waves off Ronan’s attempt to pay extra.
They end up wandering over to her book truck, parked three rows over near the flower stand, the back doors propped open with a stack of beat-up poetry collections. She leans against the doorframe while he flips through a first edition of *Moby Dick* she pulls out from a shelf, her shoulder barely three inches from his, every time she laughs at his dry joke about how half the old map notations he fixes are just sailors lying to impress their girlfriends back home, her shoulder bumps his soft enough that he’s not sure if it’s accidental. Part of him squirms with a weird, sharp disgust, the voice in his head yelling that he’s betraying his wife by even enjoying talking to another woman, that he should grab his jam and leave right now. The other part can’t stop staring at the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles, the way she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear when she’s explaining the handwritten notes in the *Moby Dick* margins, scrawled by a 1922 fisherman who’d sailed out of New Bedford.
She asks him if he wants to bring the nautical chart by her place later, says she’ll make iced peach tea sweetened with honey from her backyard hives, they can compare notes. He freezes for a full three seconds, his first instinct to lie, say he has a deadline he can’t miss, that he’s busy all week. But she tilts her head, holds his eye contact steady, doesn’t push, just waits, her fingers brushing the spine of the book she’s holding. He says yes before he can talk himself out of it.
She scribbles her address on a scrap of torn book page, presses it into his palm, her fingers lingering for half a second longer than necessary before she pulls back to help a kid who’s tugging on her sleeve asking about a stack of comic books on the lower shelf. Ronan tucks the scrap into the pocket of his flannel shirt, grabs his half of the jam, nods a goodbye she returns with a small, knowing smile before he heads back to his beat-up Ford F-150.
He pulls the scrap of paper out of his pocket when he’s sitting in the driver’s seat, turns it over. It’s a page from a 1954 collection of Mary Oliver poetry, the line “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” underlined in faint blue ink. He shoves the key in the ignition, turns it, and instead of turning left toward his quiet, empty workshop like he planned, he turns right, heading for the state liquor store to pick up a bottle of dry riesling he’d seen her mention liking on a sign taped to the side of her book truck the week prior.
