Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 28 years manning remote fire lookout towers across eastern Oregon before he retired last spring and moved to a tiny cabin outside Asheville, North Carolina to be closer to his 7-year-old granddaughter. His worst flaw, the one his daughter nagged him about every Sunday dinner, was that he’d walled himself off from any casual human connection the day his wife of 34 years died of pancreatic cancer. He’d skipped every block party, every neighborhood cookout, every senior center event since he moved, convinced all small talk was hollow, all friendliness performative. The only reason he was at the town’s summer craft beer and food festival at all was because his granddaughter had begged him to enter his famous blackberry pie in the amateur baking contest, and he couldn’t say no to her wide brown eyes.
He’d planned to drop the pie off, grab a cold IPA from the first tent he saw, and hide under an oak tree until the awards were announced so he could grab his ribbon and bolt. That plan went sideways when he stepped back to avoid a sugar-crazed 6-year-old swinging a neon blue snow cone, and his shoulder bumped the edge of a wooden table stacked with frosted glass mead bottles. The woman behind the table was reaching for a stack of paper cups at the same time, and their hands brushed. His were calloused, crisscrossed with thin white scars from decades of climbing tower ladders and chopping firewood, hers had a faint pale scar sliced across the first knuckle of her left index finger, the mark of a run-in with a juvenile black bear, she’d later tell him.
She held his eye for two beats longer than polite strangers do, a half-smirk tugging at the corner of her wine-stained mouth when she spotted the pie contest entry sticker stuck crookedly to the sleeve of his faded gray flannel, the one he still wore even when the July humidity hung so thick you could drink it. “Blackberry, right?” she said, nodding at the foil-covered tin he was clutching in his other hand. “I can smell the sugar and wild berries from here. My grandma used to make the same thing, back when we lived outside Bend.”
Ronan froze. He hadn’t talked to anyone outside his immediate family about Oregon for longer than 30 seconds since he moved. He grunted a yes at first, ready to turn and walk away, but then a sudden summer thunderstorm rolled in without warning, fat raindrops slamming into the pavement so hard they kicked up clouds of dust, and the crowd of festivalgoers scrambled for cover under the nearest tent awnings. He ended up pressed shoulder to shoulder with her, so close he could smell the lavender soap she used under the sweet, thick scent of honey fermenting in the oak barrels stacked behind her table, could feel the warmth of her arm through the thin cotton of his flannel when a gust of wind blew rain onto their ankles and she shifted closer.
For the first 10 minutes, he fought the pull of conversation. He told himself he was being stupid, that flirting with a stranger was a betrayal of his late wife, that he was too old for this kind of silly, giddy nervousness. But then she mentioned she’d spent two summers working on Oregon fire crews back in the 90s, and he couldn’t stop himself from asking if she’d been on the line for the 1996 Mount Hood complex fire. She had. They swapped stories for 45 minutes, laughing so hard his sides hurt when she described accidentally pouring a full canteen of water on her crew chief’s head when she thought he was a bear sneaking up on their camp, him telling her about the time a family of raccoons broke into his lookout tower and ate half his supply of peanut butter crackers.
He didn’t even notice the rain had stopped until the emcee’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker, calling the baking contest winners up to the stage. His pie won third place, a $25 gift card to the local hardware store he frequented twice a week, plus a cheap blue ribbon he knew his granddaughter would tape to her bedroom wall the second he got home. He turned to hold up the gift card and the ribbon to show her, his cheeks warm from the single mead sample she’d poured him, and she leaned in without thinking, brushing a crumb of blackberry pie off his stubble with her thumb. Her touch was light, lingering for half a second on the edge of his jaw, and he didn’t pull away.
The voice in his head that had spent 8 years screaming that he didn’t deserve to feel this light, this giddy, this seen, went quiet. He didn’t feel guilty anymore, didn’t feel like he was doing something wrong. He knew his wife would have laughed her head off at him, standing in a mead tent at a small town festival, flirting with a former park ranger who hated pineapple on pizza and thought fire lookout towers were the most romantic places on earth, same as he did.
He asked her if she wanted to split the gift card on a new trowel for the wildflower garden she’d mentioned tending, and a six pack of the dark oat stout he’d been eyeing at the beer tent, then meet him for a hike up to the mountain overlook just outside town the next morning. She nodded, tucking a strand of silver-streaked dark hair behind her ear, and reached under the table to grab a small glass jar of wildflower honey from her own hives, pressing it into his palm. The glass was warm from sitting in the sun before the rain hit, sticky around the rim from a leaky lid, and when their fingers brushed again, neither of them pulled away fast.
