Roman Voss, 62, spent 28 years as a smokejumper before retiring to a small cabin outside Bozeman, where he shapes custom fly rods for clients across the West. He’s avoided the annual VFW fish fry every year since he moved here five years ago, preferring the quiet of his workshop to the chaos of crowded small-town events, but his old jump buddy Tom had begged, said this year mattered more than most. The out-of-state millionaire who’d bought the 20-acre plot adjacent to the VFW hall had pushed the town council to ban the fry entirely, calling attendees “drunk, unruly locals” who tanked his property value. Turnout was double the usual, a middle finger to the rich folks trying to rewrite the town’s rules.
He leans against a scotch pine at the edge of the crowd, paper plate of fried walleye in one hand, cold Pabst in the other, the scar across his left cheek tingling in the late August sun. His hands are crisscrossed with burn scars and calluses from sanding rod blanks, his frayed 2017 fire season hoodie still has a smudge of pine resin on the cuff. He’s halfway through a bite of fish when a woman stumbles over a rolling cooler at his feet, her bare ankle catching on the plastic edge, and she lurches forward, one hand slapping lightly against his chest to steady herself, her paper plate of coleslaw tilted so far a chunk almost falls onto his boot.
He catches her elbow before she can face-plant into the dirt, his calloused fingers wrapping around the soft, warm skin of her forearm, and the first thing he notices is she smells like lavender and lemon, not the heavy perfume he’d expected from the wife of the millionaire who’d led the ban push. He’d seen her in the background of town council meetings on the local access channel, always silent, always wearing something fancy, but today she’s in a simple navy linen sundress, no makeup, her blonde hair pulled back in a loose braid, her heels discarded a few feet away where they’d sunk into the soft grass.
She apologizes, breathless, her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners when she glances down at the hand he still has on her arm, and he drops it like he’s been burned, his jaw tightening. He should tell her to get lost, that she’s not welcome here, that her husband called every person at this fry a redneck who didn’t deserve public space. But then she leans in, voice low, like she’s sharing a secret, and says she snuck out while her husband was at a golf tournament in Jackson Hole, she signed the counter-petition to keep the fry running last week, didn’t tell him, he never asks her opinion on anything anyway.
He blinks, not sure what to say, so he holds out his plate of walleye, offers her a bite. She takes it, her lips brushing the edge of the plastic fork, and she hums, says it’s better than the $80 salmon they serve at the country club her husband drags her to every weekend. They stand a foot apart at first, then a group of screaming kids chasing a golden retriever run between them, and she shifts closer, her bare arm brushing his, the heat of her skin seeping through the thin fabric of his hoodie. He doesn’t move away.
She tells him she grew up in a small town in eastern Idaho, worked as an elementary school teacher for 20 years, married her husband 12 years ago after her first husband died of a sudden heart attack, thought he’d be stable, thought the fancy house and the trips would make the loneliness go away. It didn’t. He tells her about his wife, how she died of ovarian cancer 8 years ago, how he moved to Montana to get away from the house they’d shared in Portland, how he spends 10 hours a day in his workshop shaping rods because it’s the only thing that quiets the noise in his head.
The band starts playing Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” and someone yells for people to clear a space to dance. She tilts her head, grins, asks him if he knows how to two-step. He hesitates, hasn’t danced since his wife’s 50th birthday party, but he nods, sets his half-empty beer and empty plate on a nearby picnic table, and takes her hand. His palm is rough, hers is soft, calloused only at the tips of her fingers from painting, she says, she does watercolors when her husband’s out of town.
They dance on the uneven grass, his hand on her waist, hers on his shoulder, their bodies close enough he can feel the heat radiating off her through the sundress, can hear her laugh when he steps on her toe by accident. No one pays them any mind, everyone’s too busy yelling along to the song, cheering when the VFW commander holds up a copy of the petition with 1,200 signatures, enough to kill the ban entirely. He brushes a stray strand of hair off her face as they slow dance to the next song, a cover of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”, his thumb grazing her cheek, and she leans into the touch, her eyes closing for half a second.
The sun dips below the Bridger Mountains as the set ends, the air turning crisp enough that he can see his breath when he exhales. She says she has to go, her husband will be home by midnight and she doesn’t want to deal with the questions about where she’s been. She pulls a crumpled napkin out of her purse, scribbles her phone number on it with a broken ballpoint pen, and tucks it into the front pocket of his hoodie, her fingers brushing the fabric over his chest. She tells him to call her tomorrow, she wants to see his workshop, learn how to tie the dry flies he sells at the local bait shop.
He walks her to her beat-up 2012 Subaru, parked at the edge of the lot, not the sleek Tesla her husband drives everywhere, and opens the driver’s side door for her. She squeezes his hand before she climbs in, says she’s been waiting for an excuse to leave him for months, this whole fry fiasco made her realize she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life being the quiet wife of a guy who hated everything she loved.
He stands in the gravel lot long after her taillights disappear around the bend, his fingers pressed to the napkin in his pocket, the grease from the walleye still crusted on his thumb, the string lights strung between the pine trees flickering gold over the emptying picnic tables.
