Roland Voss, 53, leans against a scotch pine at the edge of the VFW cookout, beer sweating in his grip, flecks of two-stroke oil and grease crusted under his fingernails that he couldn’t scrub out after finishing a full restoration on a 1972 Ski-Doo Elan that morning. He’d avoided this cookout for seven straight years, ever since his wife left him for a traveling roofing salesman, but his old snowmobile racing buddy had called in a favor, said he owed Roland for pulling his ass out of a ditch last winter, so he’d showed up an hour late, planned to leave after one beer. He wears a faded gray flannel even in the 82-degree heat, sleeves rolled just enough to hide the thin, jagged scar curling around his left bicep from a 2019 crash on the trails outside of town. His biggest flaw, the one his sister nags him about every Thanksgiving, is that he holds grudges so tight they carve grooves into his life—he still won’t stop at the gas station his ex used to work at, still throws out any mail with her last name on it unopened.
The crowd roars when someone drops a tray of burgers on the grill, smoke curling up to the hazy blue sky, and he’s just about to slip back to his truck when a woman steps into the space next to him, holding two paper plates stacked with brats and pickles. She’s got sun freckles splashed across her nose, a chip in the edge of her left front tooth, cutoff denim shorts and a well-worn Led Zeppelin tee that looks older than she is. “Roland, right?” she says, holding one of the plates out to him. When their fingers brush, her skin is cold from clutching a can of lime seltzer, and he feels a jolt zip up his arm that he hasn’t felt since he was 19 and kissing his high school girlfriend behind the ski shop. He fumbles the plate a little, and she laughs, low and warm, not teasing. She introduces herself as Lila, his ex-wife’s half-sister, just moved up to town to help their grandma recover from a hip replacement, only here for three months before she heads back to her job as a whitewater rafting guide in Colorado.
The first thought that pops into his head is that this is wrong, that talking to her is some kind of petty revenge against his ex, even though he hasn’t spoken to his ex in four years. He tenses up, half ready to mumble an excuse and leave, but then she makes a joke about her sister’s infamous tuna casserole that tasted like dish soap, and he snorts so hard beer comes out of his nose. She hands him a crumpled napkin, still cackling, and he finds himself leaning against the tree longer than he planned, talking to her about the snowmobile he just fixed, about the trail system he’s been mapping for the county, about the way the northern lights look out over the lake in January. She holds his eye contact every time he speaks, no glancing away to check her phone, no polite nods while she waits for her turn to talk, and she leans in when he tells a story about crashing the Ski-Doo last winter, her shoulder brushing his bicep through the flannel, her coconut shampoo mixing with the smell of charcoal and pine in the air.
They wander away from the cookout an hour later, walking down the rutted dirt path to the lake, the grass tickling his ankles through the holes in his work boots. She stops halfway to pluck a handful of wild blueberries from a bush along the path, holds one out to him between her thumb and forefinger. When he leans in to take it, his lips brush her knuckles, and he freezes, waiting for her to pull away, for the awkwardness to set in. She doesn’t pull away. She just says, soft, that she heard from her grandma that he used to bring her peaches from his tree every Christmas, that her sister was an idiot for ever leaving a guy who remembered how much her grandma loved yellow peaches. He admits he’s spent seven years avoiding anything even tangentially related to his ex, scared that letting himself want anything again would mean he was letting her win, but right now he doesn’t care about the rules he made for himself. She steps closer, her hip pressed to his, and he can hear the crickets chirping in the grass, the distant laughter from the cookout, the soft huff of her breath next to his ear.
She scribbles her phone number on a napkin from the cookout when they walk back to his truck, tells him to come by her grandma’s place tomorrow morning to look at the 1968 Arctic Cat her grandpa left in the barn, that she’ll have coffee ready, extra cream, just how he likes it. He drives home with the window rolled all the way down, the warm July air whipping through his silver-streaked hair, and he realizes he hasn’t smiled that hard in seven years. He tucks the crumpled napkin into the pocket of his flannel when he gets out of the truck, and for the first time in years, he’s looking forward to the snow.
