Eli Kozlowski, 61, retired forest fire spotter, moved to this tiny western Wisconsin river town 11 months prior to be 20 minutes from his 7-year-old granddaughter Lila. Eight years a widower, he’s spent most of those months avoiding any real small-town socializing, sick of the pitying side-eyes when people learn he lost his wife to ovarian cancer, sick of being the “new guy” everyone gossips about over potlucks and post-church coffee. He only leaves his off-grid cabin outside town for Lila’s soccer games, hardware store runs, and Wednesday nights at The Dam Bar, when they run their $3 smoked whitefish special and the bartender Jake doesn’t badger him about “getting out more.”
It’s the last Wednesday of September, the air through the bar’s open screen door smelling like fallen oak leaves and faint diesel fumes from the grain trucks rumbling down Main Street. The bar is half full, mostly farmers and construction workers yelling at the pre-season Packers game on the dented CRT in the corner. He’s halfway through his second pale ale, picking at a plate of squeaky fried cheese curds, when someone slides onto the stool two down from him. He glances over, recognizes her immediately: Clara Hale, the new town librarian, ex-wife of mayor Tom Hale, whose name is plastered on half the Little League uniforms in town. Everyone in town walks on eggshells around her; their divorce finalized six months prior, no one dares pick sides even though half the county knows Tom cheated on her with his 26-year-old office manager.
He goes back to his whitefish, flaky and salty, brushed with melted butter and dill Jake grows in his backyard, until the bartender slides an old fashioned down the bar and they both reach for it at the same time. His calloused, scarred knuckles—marked from 32 years climbing fire tower ladders, prying open stuck equipment, building deer stands—brush hers, soft, with a faint smudge of blue ink on her index finger from stamping library books. Neither pulls away for a full two seconds. She laughs first, a low, warm sound that cuts through the football yelling. “Sorry,” she says, “Haven’t had one of these in six months. Tom hated bourbon.” He smirks, pushes the glass toward her. “All yours. I’ve got enough beer in me for both of us.”
They talk for the next hour, the stool between them now pushed off to the side so they don’t have to lean around it. He can smell lavender hand lotion over the beer and fried food, sharp and sweet. She tells him she’s been restoring a vintage typewriter collection in the library’s basement, that middle schoolers line up to use them for poetry assignments because they think the clack of the keys is “aesthetic as hell.” He shows her photos on his beat-up iPhone of the 1972 Grumman canoe he’s been fixing up in his garage, the one he found at a barn sale for $40, the oak trim he sanded by hand over three weekends. When she leans in to get a better look at a photo of the canoe on his workbench, her knee brushes his under the bar, warm through the thin denim of her jeans, and his chest tightens, a feeling he hasn’t had since his wife was alive. He tells himself it’s stupid, that everyone in the bar is already staring, that Tom Hale will hear about it by breakfast and he’ll be the town pariah before the weekend. He doesn’t move away.
She leans back, takes a slow sip of her old fashioned, and holds his eye contact steady, no hesitation. “I see you launch that canoe at the public ramp every Saturday morning, head upriver toward the bluffs. I’ve been wanting to go up there to take photos of the fall foliage, but all my friends are too scared of Tom to be seen doing anything with me that could be misconstrued.” She pauses, licks her lips, and tilts her head. “You gonna let me tag along this weekend?” He freezes for half a second, already running through the list of reasons to say no: the river is cold this time of year, he likes going alone, the gossip will be unbearable. But then he looks at the ink smudge on her finger, the way her auburn hair falls over her shoulder when she leans forward, and he says, “Yeah. 7 a.m. Bring a puffer jacket, it’s freezing on the water until the sun hits the bluffs. Don’t wear white sneakers, the bottom of the canoe is always muddy.”
She grins, leans across the remaining space between them, and kisses his cheek quick, soft, her lipstick leaving a faint pink mark on his stubble. The group of farmers at the end of the bar hoot and whistle, and he feels his face heat up, for the first time in years not embarrassed by the attention, almost proud. He walks her to her car 20 minutes later, crisp autumn air nipping at his cheeks, crickets chirping in the grass along the sidewalk. She squeezes his hand before she climbs into her beat-up Subaru Outback, says, “I’ll bring the peach pie I baked this afternoon. Homemade crust, no canned filling.” He nods, watches her pull out of the parking lot before he gets in his own beat-up Ford truck.
He doesn’t turn on the radio on the drive back to his cabin, just watches the streetlights blur past, the faint pink lipstick mark still on his cheek. He doesn’t wipe it off even when he stops at the gas station for a pack of chewing tobacco. When he gets home, he drags the canoe down to the front of the garage to check the hull seal one more time, counts the life jackets twice, tucks an extra wool blanket into the dry bag. He tucks the extra jar of wildflower honey he keeps for his morning coffee into the dry bag, already looking forward to the way the sun will hit her hair when it crests over the river bluffs at dawn.
