Elroy Voss, 62, spent 28 years manning remote fire lookout towers across the Sierra Nevada before he retired, and the one personality flaw everyone in his small Truckee neighborhood called out repeatedly was his stubborn refusal to engage with any community event that didn’t involve fixing a broken water line or rescuing a lost dog. He’d holed up in his one-room cabin eight years prior, right after his wife Linda died of pancreatic cancer, and hadn’t so much as stepped foot in the annual volunteer fire department BBQ until his next door neighbor practically dragged him there, repayment for the neighbor patching Elroy’s frozen well pump the previous January when Elroy was down with a bad case of flu.
He leaned against the rough bark of a ponderosa pine, holding a lukewarm Coors Light and trying to tune out the yells of kids chasing each other with water balloons, when a woman around his age backed straight into his left arm, half a paper plate of potato salad sloshing onto the faded denim of her jeans. She cursed under her breath, turned to apologize, and Elroy caught a whiff of pine-sol and dried lavender first, then noticed the thin, silvery scar slicing through her left eyebrow, the calluses crisscrossing the fingers of her free hand, the flecks of honey gold in her hazel eyes when she held his gaze for a beat longer than polite small talk required.
She was Marnie, the new part-time librarian who’d moved to town six months prior from Portland, she said, wiping potato salad off her jeans with a crumpled napkin. She didn’t step back after she finished apologizing, just shifted her weight so her shoulder was six inches from his, close enough that he could hear her over the roar of the grill and the classic rock playing from a beat-up Bluetooth speaker on the picnic table. He grunted a reply at first, ready to make an excuse to leave, until she mentioned she’d found a tattered, leather-bound journal in a box of donated books the previous month, the one covered in sketches of red-tailed hawks and notes about wind speed and smoke plumes, signed E. Voss on the first page.
Elroy’s throat went tight. He’d thought he’d lost that journal when he cleaned out his last lookout tower three years prior, had tossed and turned for a week beating himself up for losing the last thing he’d had that held both his and Linda’s notes, the little love notes she’d scribbled in the margins when she’d visited him on the tower. He didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or grateful, and the two warring feelings sat heavy in his gut, part of him disgusted that he was even entertaining a conversation with another woman like he was forgetting Linda, the other part thrumming with a quiet curiosity he hadn’t felt in almost a decade.
She sat down on a splintered log bench a minute later, patting the spot next to her, and when he sat, her knee brushed his, light and accidental, and neither of them moved away. She asked him about the hawk sketches, about what it felt like to sit 80 feet up in a tower for 12 hours a day with no one but the birds for company, and when he told her about Linda, about how she’d bring him peach pie and bad paperback westerns on her weekend visits, there was no pity in her face, just that same steady, calm attention he’d only ever gotten from Linda before. He found himself talking for 45 minutes straight, not even noticing when his beer got warm and the sun dipped low enough to paint the tops of the pines pink.
The fire chief called the raffle then, yelling over the crowd, and Elroy’s ticket number got called first, the prize a guided stargazing trip for two up to the top of Donner Pass the following Saturday, complete with a cooler of craft beer and a professional astronomer to point out constellations. Elroy opened his mouth to say he didn’t need it, that he’d go alone or give it away, when Marnie nudged his side with her elbow, grinning, and said if he didn’t take her as his plus one, she’d keep his journal hostage and hide it in the library’s restricted archives where he’d never find it.
He hesitated for half a second, the voice in the back of his head screaming that he was betraying Linda, that he should stay in his cabin alone like he deserved, and then he laughed, a rough, rusty sound he hadn’t heard come out of his own mouth in years, and said she’d better not wear open toed shoes, the rocks up at Donner Pass were sharp as hell.
They walked to his beat-up Ford F-150 after the BBQ wrapped up, the air cool enough that he could see his breath when he exhaled, crickets chirping in the underbrush and the distant hoot of an owl echoing off the mountains. She stopped a foot away from his truck door, reached out to touch his forearm lightly, her calloused fingers warm even through the fabric of his flannel shirt, and told him she’d pick him up at 7 sharp next Saturday, no later. He nodded, leaning against the truck door, and watched her climb into her dust-covered Subaru Outback, pull out of the parking lot, and wave out the window as she turned onto the main road. He reached into the pocket of his jeans, where she’d slipped his journal when she hugged him goodbye, ran his fingers over the worn leather cover, and smiled.
