Roland Voss is 67, spent 32 years tending the Spectacle Reef Lighthouse on Lake Superior before he retired, and he’s got the scar across his left forearm to prove the time a winter gale slammed a steel hatch into him mid-inspection. His biggest flaw, if you ask his only remaining coast guard buddy Jim, is that he’s spent the last eight years acting like the world ended the day his wife Eileen passed from ovarian cancer. He avoids the town’s community events like they’re contagious, only drives the 10 minutes into Petoskey twice a week for groceries and hardware, and never makes eye contact with anyone longer than two seconds.
Jim dragged him to the summer beer garden off Main Street that Thursday under threat of hiding all his homemade fishing lures, and Roland’s been nursing the same draft IPA for 45 minutes, half listening to the bluegrass band pluck away off to the side, when the table shifts across from him. He looks up, and it’s Mara Hale, the town librarian he’s been ducking in the grocery store checkout line for six months straight. She’s got a half-empty hard seltzer in one hand and a paper plate stacked with grilled bratwurst and potato salad in the other, and she huffs a laugh when she sees him. “Every other table’s full,” she says, sliding onto the bench without waiting for permission. The denim of her jeans brushes his calf under the table, and Roland’s throat goes dry faster than if he’d swallowed a mouthful of lake sand.
He’s heard the gossip around town, the group of retired schoolteachers who hang out at the diner muttering about how she’s divorced twice, moved up from Detroit last year, “doesn’t know how to keep to herself.” He’d told himself a hundred times he had no business noticing the way her sun-streaked brown hair falls in a loose braid over her shoulder, or the lavender hand cream she wears that lingers in the cereal aisle long after she’s left, or the way she laughs so hard at the paperback romance novels she reads on her lunch break that her shoulders shake. He’d told himself it was disrespectful, that Eileen would have hated him even looking twice at another woman, that getting involved with anyone would just end in more heartache he doesn’t have the energy for.
She leans forward to set her plate down, and her elbow brushes his where it’s resting on the splintered picnic table. “Sorry,” she says, and her knee brushes his again when she shifts to get comfortable. “These benches were clearly built for people half our size.” Roland grunts, takes a sip of his beer to avoid talking, and she snorts. “You know, I’ve been getting in your checkout line at the IGA every Tuesday and Thursday for three months, and you’ve never said a single word to me. I was starting to think you didn’t speak English.” He blinks, shocked. He’d thought he was the one being subtle, timing his trips to the store when he knew she’d be there, grabbing an extra lemon every time just to have an excuse to linger a second longer by her cart.
A gust of wind blows a paper napkin off her plate onto his lap, and she leans across the table to grab it. Her hair brushes his cheek, and he can smell the lavender hand cream again, mixed with the coconut sunscreen she’s wearing and the faint charcoal smoke from the grills off to the side. He freezes, every nerve ending in his body lighting up like the lighthouse beacon he used to tend, and she pauses for a second, her face inches from his, her dark eyes glinting in the string lights strung over the tables. “I saw the blueberries you leave on the library book drop every Saturday morning,” she says, quiet enough that only he can hear it, over the sound of the band and the crowd laughing around them. “The ones still dewy, picked that morning. I knew they were from you. No one else in town picks wild blueberries that good.”
Roland’s face heats up, and he rubs the back of his neck, the scar on his forearm pulling a little. He’d thought he was being sneaky, leaving them there before the library opened, never letting anyone see him. “You make those blueberry scones with them?” he asks, and she grins, nodding. “Best I’ve ever had. My ex-husband could barely boil water, let alone bake.” He laughs, a real one, the kind he hasn’t let out in years, and her hand brushes his when she reaches for her seltzer. The touch is light, accidental, but it sends a jolt up his arm that settles low in his chest, the kind of warm, thrumming excitement he’d thought he’d never feel again. He’s still half convinced he’s betraying Eileen, half scared that this will blow up in his face, that the gossip will get bad, that he’ll end up alone again, but for the first time in eight years, the desire to stay, to talk to her, to see where this goes, is stronger than the fear.
Jim walks up a minute later, holding two more beers, and he grins when he sees the two of them leaning in like they’re sharing a secret. “I’m gonna go catch the end of the band’s set,” he says, setting one of the beers down in front of Roland, winking. “Don’t wait up for me.” Roland rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling, and when he looks back at Mara, she’s biting her lip to keep from laughing. He reaches across the table, brushes a stray pine needle off the shoulder of her faded red flannel shirt, his fingers lingering for half a second on the soft cotton. “I make a mean lemon meringue pie,” he says. “You wanna come over to my cottage tomorrow afternoon and try it? I got a porch that overlooks the lake, we can watch the sunset.”
She takes a sip of her seltzer, never breaking eye contact, and nods, the corner of her mouth tugging up into a lazy smile. “I’ll bring the blueberry scones. Don’t burn the pie.” He picks up his cold beer, taps it against her frosted seltzer can, the aluminum clinking loud enough to cut through the noise of the crowd around them.
