Elias Voss, 52, spent 18 years as a forest fire smokejumper before a blown knee sidelined him, now runs a one-man custom axe restoration shop out of his garage outside Missoula. He’s stubborn to a fault, still sleeps on the same side of the king bed he shared with his wife Marnie until her fatal car crash 8 years prior, refuses to let anyone drop by his shop unannounced, convinced any new soft spot in his life is just something the world can burn down later. He’s at the county fair only because he donated a hand-forged throwing axe for the volunteer fire department raffle, the kind of thing that draws a crowd of outdoor dads and teen boys who think they can hit a target from 20 feet. The air smells like fried onion rings, sunbaked pine, and the faint acrid tang of the porta-potty line down the path, and he’s already planning his escape back to his quiet workshop when his throat goes dry.
The only lemonade stand within 500 feet is tucked right next to the 4-H peach pie contest booth, and he knows Lena is running it. Marnie’s first cousin, 48, divorced three years back, moved back to town last spring to run her family’s peach orchard. He’s dodged her at the hardware store, at the post office, at the annual fire department barbecue for six months straight, ever since she’d laughed so hard at his terrible joke about faulty axe handles she snort-laughed beer out her nose, and he’d felt a lurch in his chest he’d thought died with Marnie. It feels wrong, dirty almost, to look at her and feel anything other than distant familial fondness, like he’s breaking a promise he never actually made. But his throat is too dry to ignore, so he hunches his shoulders, adjusts the frayed ball cap on his head, and heads for the booth.
She spots him before he can get halfway there, leans across the wooden counter, and waves so hard her stack of paper plates teeters. Her sun-warmed forearm brushes his when she hands him a plastic cup of lemonade, the skin soft under the faint dust of peach fuzz stuck to her wrist, her nails chipped the same mint green as the front door of her orchard cottage. He notices the smudge of peach filling on the edge of her jaw before he can stop himself, and before he thinks better of it, he reaches out to brush it away with the pad of his thumb. Their fingers bump when she lifts her own hand to her face at the same time, and they both freeze for half a beat, the noise of the ferris wheel creaking and the kids screaming on the tilt-a-whirl fading to a low hum for a second.
He yanks his hand back like he touched a hot stove, heat crawling up his neck, half expecting her to yell, or tell the rest of the family he’s being a creep. Instead she grins, wipes the filling off with her own thumb and licks it off, holding his gaze the whole time. She teases him about hiding out in his shop like a hermit, says she’s called his business line three times to ask him to restore her dad’s old felling axe for her son’s high school graduation gift, and he never called back. He mumbles an excuse about being busy, but the truth is he’d seen her name on the caller ID and hit ignore every time, too scared of what talking to her for longer than five minutes would unearth in him.
She tugs on the cuff of his flannel shirt before he can make an excuse to leave, pulls him back behind the booth, between the canvas side wall and a stack of wooden pie crates, out of sight of the crowd milling past. The space is tight, their shoulders pressed together, and he can smell the coconut sunscreen she wears mixed with the sweet, ripe scent of the peaches in the pies next to them. She says she knows it’s weird, knows everyone in town will talk if they see them together, knows he probably still feels like he’s betraying Marnie even thinking about this, but she’s liked him since she was 22 and watched him carry Marnie across the threshold of their first house, and she’s tired of pretending she doesn’t.
The part of him that’s spent 8 years walling himself off screams that this is a terrible idea, that he’s going to get his heart broken again, that he’s crossing a line he can never uncross. But the other part of him, the part that’s been cold and empty for longer than he can remember, warms right through, and he finds himself admitting he’s been avoiding her because he’s been scared of exactly this, scared of feeling like he’s allowed to be happy again. She laces her fingers through his, her palm soft against the calluses on his hands from sanding axe handles all day, and says Marnie used to tell her if she ever got the courage to make a move on Elias, she’d be the first to bring them a pie to celebrate.
He stays back there with her for another 20 minutes, talking quiet while the line for pie ebbs and flows on the other side of the canvas, making plans for her to bring the old axe to his workshop next Saturday, to stay for dinner after if she wants. She hands him a warm slice of first-place peach pie in a paper plate when he leaves, extra crust, the way Marnie always used to make it for him. He walks back to his beat up Ford pickup, the pie in one hand and the half-empty lemonade cup sweating in the other, and when he glances over his shoulder halfway across the fairground, she’s leaning against the booth counter waving, a smudge of new peach filling on her cheek this time.
