Elias Voss, 62, retired U.S. Forest Service fire spotter, leaned against the splintered edge of a pine picnic table in the Darby, Montana, rodeo beer garden, sweating can of Pabst in one hand, worn Stetson pulled low enough to block most of the neighboring groups’ line of sight. He’d only showed up because his 17-year-old nephew was competing in the steer wrestling, and the kid had called him three times in the week leading up to it, saying he was the only family he had that didn’t nitpick his weight or his choice to skip college for pro rodeo. Elias had spent the last 8 years living alone in a fire tower 45 minutes outside of town, only moving down to a small cabin on the edge of the valley last spring, so crowds still made his skin prickle. He hated small town gossip most of all, had spent enough years listening to old timers whisper about how he’d “checked out” after his wife died in a 2015 car crash, how he’d never be right again.
The last of the saddle bronc rides wrapped up as the sun dipped below the Bitterroot Range, painting the sky bruised purple and tangerine. All the other picnic tables were packed, so when the woman he recognized as Mara, the one who ran the used bookstore on Main Street, set her own can of black cherry hard seltzer down across from him and nodded, he didn’t tell her to leave. Her knee-length denim skirt brushed the scuffed toe of his work boot when she sat, and he caught a whiff of cedar and lavender hand cream, sharp and warm, not the cloying rose perfume the church ladies wore to weekly bake sales. She had a thick streak of silver running through the left side of her dark hair, pulled back in a loose braid, and a small silver scar snaking across her left knuckle. “Hiding from my cousin,” she said, leaning forward a little, voice low enough that only he could hear over the roar of the crowd. “She’s been trying to set me up with the feed store owner for three months. Dude collects taxidermied squirrels dressed as rodeo clowns. I’d rather chug a whole jar of the concession stand’s pickled eggs than sit through dinner with him.”
Elias huffed a laugh, surprised at how easy it came out. He hadn’t talked to anyone who wasn’t his nephew or the cashier at the grocery store for more than 10 minutes in months. “Squirrel clowns do sound worse than pickled eggs,” he said, and she grinned, holding eye contact longer than most people did with him, like she wasn’t put off by the scar that split his right eyebrow from a falling branch back in 2019, or the quiet reputation he had for being a reclusive hermit. When she reached across the table to grab a napkin that had blown toward his side, her wrist brushed his, and he felt the calluses on her skin, rough from hauling boxes of books and reshelving hardcovers for 12 years. She didn’t yank her hand away, just let it linger for half a second before she sat back, wiping a smudge of barbecue sauce off her chin.
They talked through the final awards ceremony, Elias telling her about the time a black bear climbed up the last 10 feet of his fire tower and stole his jar of crunchy peanut butter, Mara telling him about the time a tourist tried to pay for a $12 copy of *Where the Red Fern Grows* with a live trout he’d caught that morning. He kept forgetting to check over his shoulder for people who might stare, might whisper, might run their mouths about the reclusive widower talking to the divorcée who’d left her husband for a solo road trip to Alaska 10 years prior, who everyone in town said was “too picky” to ever date again. The conflict warred in his chest: part of him hated the idea of being the topic of every coffee shop conversation for the next week, the other part of him couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this light, this seen, like someone didn’t look at him and only see his dead wife, only see the guy who lived in a tower and talked to no one.
When the fireworks started, the whole crowd stood up, cheering, bright red and blue sparks bursting over the rodeo grounds. Mara leaned in close to yell over the noise, her breath warm against the shell of his ear, and he felt his neck prickle. “I got a first edition of *A River Runs Through It* in the shop yesterday,” she said, her shoulder pressed firm against his bicep. “Wanna come see it? We can cut through the alley behind the beer garden, no one will see us leave. No gossips, no squirrel-clown-obsessed cousins. Just us and the books.”
Elias hesitated for half a second, thinking about all the unwritten rules of small town life, about the way people would talk if they found out, about the voice in his head that had told him for 8 years he didn’t get to have nice things anymore, that he was supposed to grieve forever. Then he nodded, slipping his Stetson a little lower on his head, and she grinned, grabbing his wrist to pull him through the crowd toward the back fence.
The alley was quiet, the noise of the rodeo fading behind them, firework flashes lighting up the red brick walls of the buildings on either side. Her hand brushed his three times as they walked, each time lingering a little longer, before she laced her fingers through his, her calloused palm fitting perfectly against his, scarred from decades of chopping wood and climbing fire towers and fixing the vintage chainsaws he collected in his garage. He didn’t pull away. He squeezed her hand a little tighter, and when she glanced up at him, grinning, he smiled back, for the first time in years not worrying about who might see.
