Roman Voss, 61, retired Chicago O’Hare air traffic controller, stood in the small northern Michigan lake town’s annual fish fry line squinting at lake gnats swirling over the fryer, his boot prodding a half-empty root beer can in the grass. He’d spent 32 years making split-second life-or-death decisions on the job, but in the four years since his wife died and he moved north, he’d turned avoiding risk into a full-time hobby. He mapped every grocery run, kept his beehive checks timed down to the minute, and had gone out of his way to avoid his new next-door neighbor for three straight weeks, even when she left jars of pickled jalapeños on his porch step that were so good he’d eaten three straight from the fridge with a fork.
The line shifted, and someone bumped his shoulder. He turned, and there she was. Marisol, 58, the travel nurse the whole town had been whispering about, the one no one was supposed to ask out for six months lest she spill all their private urgent care gossip to the general store crowd. She wiped flour off her forearm, her cherry-red nail polish chipped at the edges, a smudge of rhubarb filling on the corner of her mouth. She smelled like vanilla and cut grass and the kind of pie that sticks to your ribs. She was close enough he could see the tiny silver hoop in her left nostril, faint laugh lines fanning out from her dark brown eyes.
“Figured I’d find you here,” she said, nodding at the faded “I Put Hot Sauce On Everything” license plate frame peeking out from under his flannel shirt, the one he’d forgotten he’d tucked in his pocket that morning. “You don’t exactly make yourself easy to track down.”
He froze, his hand tightening around the crumpled five-dollar bill he’d been holding for his cod dinner. He’d thought he’d been stealthy, ducking behind his maple tree when she pulled into her driveway, rushing to get his mail before she came outside to walk her hound dog. She’d noticed him anyway. He mumbled a half-assed apology for not stopping by to thank her for the jalapeños, and she laughed, a low warm sound that cut through the crowd chatter. Her shoulder brushed his again, intentional this time, and he felt the heat of her through his shirt.
He offered to carry the stack of pie slices she’d been holding to a table, and when their hands brushed passing the tray off, he felt calluses on her palm, rough from hiking the trails around the lake, a tiny scar wrapping around her wrist from a dog bite she got on a travel assignment in Phoenix. They sat at a picnic table at the far edge of the park, far enough from the rest of the town that no one could gawk, no one could tsk about him breaking the silly unspoken rule about the new nurse. He told her about the baby swan he’d rescued from a fishing net the week before, the one he’d nursed back to health in his garage until the DNR came to pick it up, a story he hadn’t told anyone else. She told him about delivering a baby in the back of a pickup truck on a Wyoming dirt road, how she’d used a ballpoint pen to cut the umbilical cord.
The sun dipped below the lake, painting the sky pink and tangerine, and her knee brushed his under the table. She didn’t move it. He didn’t move his. Crickets hummed, and old Johnny Cash drifted over from the bar down the road. She leaned in, her voice dropping so only he could hear, and said she’d made extra rhubarb pie that morning, set a whole one aside for him if he wanted to come over and try it sometime. He thought about his rigid schedule, the 7am beehive checks he had planned for the next day, the town gossip he’d have to deal with if anyone saw them together. He didn’t care.
He told her he had honey he’d harvested the week before, the good stuff from hives at the edge of his property, that it would pair perfect with the rhubarb. She grinned, pulled a crumpled napkin out of her apron pocket, scribbled her phone number on it in blue ballpoint, a stray crumb of pie crust sticking to the edge of the ink. He tucked the napkin into his shirt pocket right over his heart, and walked her to her beat-up Subaru. She squeezed his bicep when she said goodbye, her fingers pressing firm into the muscle, and he felt the weight of that touch long after she pulled out of the parking lot.
He took the long way home, stopping to skip a stone across the lake, cool night air biting at his cheeks. When he got to his porch, he spotted a new jar of pickled jalapeños tucked next to his rain gauge, a sticky note stuck to the lid that said “For the hot sauce guy.” He picked it up, twisted the lid off, took a bite, and grinned.
