Elias Voss, 62, spent 28 years leaping out of prop planes into raging wildfire zones before a blown-out knee and a widowmaker heart attack sidelined him for good. Now he runs small-group wild mushroom foraging tours for rich tourists who can’t tell a morel from a chanterelle, lives alone in a one-room cabin 12 miles outside Ashland, and hasn’t so much as held another person’s hand since his wife packed her bags and left for Portland 12 years prior. His biggest flaw, if you ask the few friends he has left, is that he’s convinced every good thing that drifts into his orbit is only there to burn him sooner or later.
He’s perched on his usual stool at the far end of the White Mountain Saloon on a rainy Wednesday, nursing a rye and ginger, the scar slashing across his left cheek pulling tight when he winces at the banjo player’s off-key solo. The bar is packed, shoulder to shoulder with college kids up from the university, retired hippies selling weed out of their campers, and a handful of locals he’s known for decades. He’d almost skipped the night’s show, until he spotted her two stools down, legs crossed, scuffed waterproof hiking boots peeking out from under the hem of a faded corduroy skirt.
She’s Mara Hale, 58, the new part-time children’s librarian at the Ashland public library, and his late best friend’s little sister. He’d first run into her three weeks prior on a hike, when she’d been panicking because her golden retriever had run off chasing a deer, and he’d helped her corral the pup an hour later. He’d known her since she was 16, pigtailed and sneaking sips of her brother’s beer at Fourth of July cookouts, and he’d deliberately ducked every chance he’d had to run into her since that hike, because the way she’d laughed when the dog slobbered all over his flannel had settled low in his chest like a spark he couldn’t stamp out, and he’d thought crossing that line was wrong, disrespectful to the friend he’d lost to a heart attack five years prior.
A guy carrying a full pitcher of IPA stumbles past, slamming into Mara’s shoulder, and she lurches sideways directly into Elias’s side. Her shoulder presses firm into his bicep, and he catches a whiff of cedar shampoo and peppermint lip balm before she grabs for the bar to steady herself, her soft, cool hand brushing the scarred, calloused knuckles of his left hand. She apologizes, cheeks flushed, and doesn’t move back to her original stool, just shifts to the one directly next to him, her knee brushing his under the bar when she settles in.
She asks how the foraging tours are going, and he’s surprised she even knows what he does for work now. They talk slow, over the twang of the band, the murmur of the crowd, the clink of beer mugs against the sticky linoleum bar. He learns her husband died two years prior from pancreatic cancer, that she moved to Ashland to be closer to her brother’s old friends, that she hikes three times a week and can name every native wildflower within 50 miles. She keeps glancing up at him from under her lashes, her green eyes crinkling at the corners when he makes a dry joke about the tourists who try to eat poisonous mushrooms because they look “cute.” Her foot brushes his under the bar again, and this time she doesn’t look away, just gives him a small, knowing smile that makes his ears go hot.
The band announces their last song, a slow waltz, and the bar owner yells over the crowd that anyone who’s been dancing around a crush all night better make their move now. Mara turns to him, her elbow propped on the bar, and says he owes her a dance, and he owes her a follow-up on the hiking poles she lost the same day her dog ran off, the ones he’d said he’d help her look for and then never followed through on. He hesitates for half a second, the old voice in his head screaming that this is wrong, that he’s too broken, too rough, too old for this, then he stands, wipes his sweaty palms on the front of his jeans, and holds out his hand.
Her hand is smaller than his, soft but with a faint callus on her index finger from turning thousands of book pages, and it fits perfectly in his palm when he laces their fingers together. They step to the small patch of cleared floor in the corner, his hand resting light on her waist, hers on his shoulder, and they sway slow to the music. She leans in a little, her breath warm against his neck, and says she’s had a crush on him since she was 19, when he’d carried her out of a lake after she’d twisted her ankle on a camping trip, and she’d waited 39 years for him to stop being an idiot.
He walks her to her beat-up Toyota pickup after the show, holds the door open for her, and when she asks him to follow her home to make sure she doesn’t hydroplane on the wet back roads, he doesn’t argue. He sits on her porch with her for an hour after they pull up, drinking hot cocoa she makes in chipped mugs, and when she leans in to kiss him, he doesn’t pull away. She tells him to meet her at the trailhead at 9 a.m. Saturday to look for those lost hiking poles, writes her cell phone number on a scrap of receipt from her purse, and presses it into his palm.
He tucks the scrap of paper into the inside pocket of his flannel, turns toward his truck, and for the first time in 12 years, he doesn’t feel the urge to run.
