Elias Voss, 52, custom log furniture builder, has spent the entire week snapping at his part-time apprentice and cussing out out-of-state tourists who park their RVs in the turnaround outside his workshop. The annual mountain foliage festival has turned the two-lane road through his corner of western North Carolina into a parking lot, and he missed three client appointments because no one could get through the gridlock. He blows off the rest of his workday at 7 p.m., wipes sawdust off his flannel sleeves, and drives 15 minutes into town to the only tavern within 20 miles that pours a decent hazy IPA.
The bar is packed wall to wall with festival goers in puffer vests and hiking boots, and he grabs the last open stool right by the tap handles. He slumps back, flags the bartender, and orders his beer, peeling the label off the bottle while he waits for his friend’s bluegrass set to start. Two minutes later, someone slides into the stool next to him, and he tenses up immediately when he recognizes her. It’s Clara Hale, wife of the county commissioner who denied his zoning request to expand his workshop three weeks prior. He’d ranted about her husband to anyone who would listen ever since, calling the man a corrupt hack who only cared about lining his own pockets with festival revenue.
He leans as far away as he can without falling off his stool, but the crowd presses in tight, their elbows brushing every time either of them reaches for their drink. He steals a glance over when he thinks she’s not looking, surprised to see her in a faded 1990s Alan Jackson tour shirt and scuffed work boots instead of the tailored blazer and pearls she wore to the zoning meeting. She catches him staring, smirks, and nods at the sawdust flecked on his jeans. “You’re the furniture guy who called my husband’s parking proposal ‘brain-dead enough to make a goat blush,’ right?”
He tenses, ready to defend himself, but she snorts, sipping her margarita. “For the record, I agreed with you. He won’t listen to anyone who doesn’t write him a check for his re-election campaign. I’ve been trying to get him to adjust the festival parking plan for three years.” He blinks, thrown off. He’d assumed she was just as stuck up and unapproachable as her husband, but she leans in when he starts talking about his workshop, her knee brushing his under the bar, and he can smell cedar and vanilla on her hair over the smell of beer and fried cheese curds filling the room.
The band starts playing a slow, twangy cover of *Angel from Montgomery*, and the crowd shifts closer, her shoulder pressing fully to his, warm through the thin cotton of her shirt. She reaches across him to grab a napkin when a little of her margarita sloshes over the edge of the glass, her hand brushing his chest for half a second, and he feels heat rise up his neck, a flutter he hasn’t felt since his divorce 8 years prior. He’s spent so long shutting everyone out, convinced he’s too set in his routine to make space for anyone else, that the feeling catches him off guard.
She mentions she’s been trying to track him down for weeks, wants him to build a custom set of live-edge bookshelves for the small community library she runs out of the basement of the town hall. She’s had three contractors flake on her already, and she fell in love with the coffee table he built for the main street coffee shop, loves how he leaves the natural bark on the edges instead of sanding it smooth. He can’t stop staring at the smudge of ink on her left wrist, the way she tucks her hair behind her ear when she laughs. The band wraps their first set to loud cheers, and she leans in so close her breath is warm on his ear, the noise of the crowd fading out for a second. “You wanna walk down to the creek behind the bar? I can’t hear myself think in here.”
He says yes before he can overthink it. They push through the crowd out the back door, the crisp October air hitting his face, the ground crunching under their boots from fallen red maple leaves. Festival string lights are strung through the oak trees lining the path, and the distant sound of the band mixes with the gurgle of the creek when they reach the bank. She stops, turns to him, and chews on her lower lip for a second. “I know this is messy. Everyone in town knows you hate my husband. I haven’t been happy in that marriage in six years, but I didn’t want to rock the boat while the library expansion was going through.”
He doesn’t say anything for a second, just reaches out, tucks a stray strand of hair that blew into her face behind her ear, his calloused fingers brushing her soft cheek. She leans into the touch, her hand coming up to rest on his wrist. They don’t make any big, dramatic plans, don’t talk about what this means for the zoning request or the election or what the town gossips will say if they see them together. They just stand there for ten minutes, listening to the creek and the distant sound of the band starting their second set, before he offers to drive her back to her car parked on the other side of town.
When he opens the passenger door of his beat-up Ford F-150 for her, she brushes her hand against his wrist as she climbs in, and he already knows he’s going to show up at the town hall library with a sketch of the bookshelves first thing tomorrow morning.
