Elias Voss, 62, spent 27 years manning the remote Granite Island lighthouse on Lake Superior before they automated it three years back. His ex-wife left him 18 years prior for a man who sold overpriced snowmobile tours to tourists, and he’s carried a chip on his shoulder about her entire family ever since, refusing to attend any local gatherings where he might run into any of them up until last Saturday. He only showed up to the town’s fall harvest festival because his neighbor practically begged him to enter his smoked salmon in the contest, and he’d won $75 in gift cards to the local hardware store, so he figured he’d stick around for one spiced Oktoberfest before heading home to his quiet, empty cabin.
He was leaning against a splintered wooden support pole at the beer tent, boots propped on a cinder block, watching a group of preteens slurp their way through a pumpkin pie eating contest, when someone bumped hard into his left elbow. Beer sloshed over the rim of the thick plastic cup, dribbling down the front of his faded red flannel, the cold liquid seeping through the thin fabric to kiss the skin of his chest, and he huffed, ready to snap at whoever wasn’t paying attention, before he looked down.
She was 58, silver hair pulled back in a loose braid streaked with the last of the summer’s blonde highlights, freckles across her nose that hadn’t faded since the last time he’d seen her at his wedding 25 years prior. She was Clara, his ex-wife’s youngest cousin, the one who’d moved to Oregon right after high school and only came back to town a few months prior to take over the county librarian position. She held her own cup of honey crisp hard cider in one hand, the other hovering over his flannel like she wanted to dab the beer off but didn’t dare, and she laughed, quiet and warm, the sound cutting through the tinny Johnny Cash cover playing from the stage a hundred feet away. “Sorry about that. These gravel paths are a death trap in these boots,” she said, wiggling her foot to show off scuffed leather work boots caked with mud from her morning hike, not the fancy stiletto heels he remembered his ex wearing to every stuffy family function.
Elias’s first instinct was to grumble a half-assed excuse and walk away. He’d spent almost two decades avoiding every single person related to his ex, convinced they all thought he was a boring, reclusive loser who couldn’t keep a wife happy. But then she smelled like cinnamon gum and old paper, the same scent he’d always associated with the tiny library he’d visited every Saturday as a kid, and she said, “I found those nautical charts you donated back in 2007, by the way. The ones of the south shore shipwrecks? I framed a couple and hung them in the local history section. They’re gorgeous.”
That stopped him cold. His ex had thrown those charts in a beat-up cardboard box while he was out on a two-week lighthouse shift, told him they were cluttering up the house and made him drop them off at the library, even though he’d collected them for 12 years, hand-annotating every shipwreck site he’d helped locate during coast guard rescue missions. He’d thought they’d been tossed in a dumpster years ago.
He shifted his weight, leaning off the pole so he was standing a foot closer to her, close enough that he could see the flecks of moss green in her hazel eyes, the faint scar along her jaw from a bike crash when she was 16, he remembered that, his ex had made fun of her for it for weeks at family dinners. “You kept those?” he said, and his voice was rougher than he meant it to be, the spiced beer’s nutty, sweet aftertaste still lingering on his tongue.
“Of course I did,” she said, and she stepped a little closer too, her forearm brushing his when she lifted her cider to take a sip, the soft fabric of her knit cardigan warm against his bare skin where his flannel sleeve was rolled up. “I’ve read all your old rescue reports, too. You saved 19 people out there, right? No one around town ever talks about that. They just talk about how you’re the grumpy guy who lives up in the woods and never talks to anyone.”
Elias laughed, a real one, the deep, rumbly kind he barely let out more than once a month. They sat down at a wobbly picnic table off to the side of the beer tent, the weathered wood rough under his palms, their knees brushing under the table every time one of them shifted, and they talked for an hour, about the library’s upcoming winter used book sale, about the model lighthouses he built in his workshop now that he was retired, about the way the lake looked in November when the waves got so high they crashed over the breakwater at the marina, sending spray 30 feet in the air. He didn’t even notice when a few of his ex’s distant cousins walked past and stared, he was too busy listening to her talk about how she wanted to start a monthly nautical history night at the library, ask him to come speak as the first guest.
He knew it was stupid, knew if his ex caught wind of them talking she’d call every family member she had and scream about how he was trying to cause drama, knew half the town would whisper about it for a week. But when she brushed a crumb of salted caramel corn off his knee, her hand lingering on his thick denim for half a second longer than it needed to, he didn’t care about any of that. He’d spent 18 years shutting everyone out just to avoid a little awkwardness, and it had gotten him nothing but a quiet house and a lot of nights eating frozen meatloaf dinners alone in front of old western reruns.
She smiled, tucked a loose strand of silver hair behind her ear, stood up too, and slipped her hand into the crook of his arm, her palm warm through the thin fabric of his flannel. They walked past the pie eating contest, past the knit scarf craft booths, past the group of his old coast guard buddies who waved and winked when they saw them, and Elias didn’t pull his arm away.
