Moe Halvorsen, 61, has built custom fly rods out of his garage workshop outside Duluth for 18 years, ever since a falling tree crushed his left ankle on a fire spotting shift and forced his early retirement from the Forest Service. His biggest flaw, if you ask his only remaining drinking buddy Ray, is that he’s spent the eight years since his wife Carol died acting like the world’s only supposed to offer him cold beer and silent trout streams, no small talk, no new people, no surprises. He only agreed to set up a booth at the town’s summer street fair because Ray owed him a case of rare Canadian ale, and the craft vendor fee was waived for local tradesmen.
The August sun hung low enough by 7 PM to gild the tops of the pine trees lining Main Street, so Moe packed up his display rods and dragged a folding chair to the outdoor beer garden attached to the only bar in town, ordering a Pabst and propping his bad ankle up on a cinder block. The air smelled like fried cheese curds, citronella candles, and the faint, sharp tang of pine smoke from a campground three miles out. He was half-asleep, watching a group of teens race go-karts down the closed-off stretch of road, when a shadow fell over his table.
It was Lila Marlow, Carol’s second cousin’s daughter, the kid he’d taught to tie a woolly bugger when she was 16, the one who’d showed up to Carol’s funeral with a jar of wild blackberries she’d picked off the bush behind Carol’s old childhood home. He hadn’t seen her in five years, not since she’d moved out to Oregon to work at a horse rescue, and he blinked twice to make sure he wasn’t mixing her up with some stranger. She pulled out the chair across from him without asking, and when she sat, her denim-clad knee brushed his calf through the hole in his work jeans, a warm, accidental jolt that made him sit up straight.
She ordered a hard seltzer from the waitress, and leaned forward on her elbows, the edge of her faded rescue farm hoodie brushing the top of his booth table. Her hair was streaked with gray at the temples, pulled back in a messy braid, and there was a smudge of dark dirt on the left side of her jaw, a faint scar snaking across her right wrist from a horse bite she’d gotten when she was 19. She held eye contact with him longer than was strictly polite, a half-smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, and Moe found himself looking away first, fidgeting with the frayed cuff of his flannel shirt, a weird twist of guilt and something warmer in his gut. He’d only ever thought of her as a kid, loud and covered in mosquito bites, always chasing some stray animal through the woods. But she was 42 now, her hands calloused from hauling dog crates and mending fence posts, her laugh rough and low when she told him she’d moved back to town three months prior to run the new small-animal rescue on the old farm at the edge of the county line.
She told him she still had the fly rod he’d made her for that 16th birthday, the one with the blue thread wraps she’d picked out herself, that she’d taken it fishing just last week on the north fork of the St. Louis River, caught a 17-inch brown trout on the woolly bugger he’d tied for her that same day. Moe felt his chest tighten, half with the familiar ache of missing Carol, half with a weird, giddy flutter he hadn’t felt since he was 20 years old, asking Carol out to the drive-in for the first time. He felt guilty, like he was doing something wrong, something disloyal, even though Carol had told him on her deathbed not to spend the rest of his life alone. When Lila leaned sideways to point at a golden retriever puppy one of the rescue volunteers was carrying past the booth, her shoulder pressed against his bicep for three full seconds, and he could smell lavender soap and the faint, earthy odor of horse shampoo on her skin, and he didn’t lean away.
She asked him if he knew how to tie fence knots, said the storm the week prior had blown down 40 feet of pasture fence at the rescue, and she didn’t trust the local handyman to do a tight enough job to keep the mini pony from squeezing through and eating all the chicken feed. Moe hesitated for half a second, the voice in the back of his head hissing that he was supposed to go home, watch old baseball games, drink beer alone, not hang out with a woman 19 years younger than him who used to call him Uncle Moe when she was little. But then she tilted her head, and her smile softened, and he found himself saying yes before he could overthink it.
When she reached across the table to squeeze his hand in thanks, her palm rough and warm against his, he curled his fingers around hers for a beat before she pulled away. She told him she’d be by his house at 9 AM the next day, brought him an extra order of cheese curds from the food truck, and left to go corral the puppy that had just escaped its volunteer handler. Moe sat there for another hour, drinking his beer, the ghost of her touch still on his hand, the guilt that had sat heavy in his chest for eight years feeling lighter than it had since the day Carol died. He finished his beer, packed up his rods, and drove home with his windows down, the cool August wind blowing through his hair, already looking forward to the feel of fence post wood under his hands the next morning.
