Elias Voss, 62, retired U.S. Forest Service fire spotter, had not set foot in the county fair’s beer tent in eight years. He’d avoided all crowded local events, really, after his wife packed her SUV and drove south to move in with a 38-year-old realtor who specialized in lakefront vacation homes. His flaw, as his old crew chief Ron liked to tease, was that he’d rather sit alone in his off-grid cabin chopping wood and re-reading tattered Jack London paperbacks than risk the awkward small talk and well-meaning but intrusive questions about his love life from every neighbor within a 20-mile radius. Ron had dragged him out that night, saying if he didn’t get some human contact that didn’t involve a squirrel or a trail camera, he was going to turn into a full-time hermit and forget how to speak.
The tent reeked of spilled craft ale, fried onions, and coconut tanning oil. A cover band on the small stage cranked out a rough rendition of Folsom Prison Blues, loud enough that Elias could feel the bass thrumming through the sticky, beer-soaked plywood under his scuffed work boots. He’d kept his faded fire-resistant jacket zipped up even though the September air was warm enough that most everyone else was in tank tops or cutoffs, a quiet barrier between him and the crowd. He was halfway through a sour cherry ale, pretending to scroll through photos on his beat-up flip phone to avoid eye contact, when someone bumped his elbow hard enough that a few drops of beer sloshed over the rim onto his wrist.
He looked up, ready to snap, and froze. It was Maeve Carter, the new county librarian everyone had been trying to set him up with for the past six months. He’d avoided her on purpose, written her off as the kind of frumpy, cardigan-clad busybody who ran book clubs for bored retirees and lectured people about late fees. But she was nothing like the mental picture he’d built. She had auburn hair streaked with sun-bleached gold pulled back in a loose braid, a faded Pearl Jam t-shirt tucked into high-waisted cutoffs, and a well-worn flannel tied around her waist. Her forearms were dusted with freckles, and he spotted a tiny scar curling around her left wrist, the kind you get from a falling tree branch. She smelled like lavender soap and pine, sharp and clean, nothing like the heavy perfume his ex-wife used to douse herself in for fair nights.
“Sorry about that,” she yelled over the band, leaning in so her shoulder brushed his bicep, warm through the thin fabric of his jacket. “Some guy with a corn dog almost took me out a second ago, I’m still off balance.” She held up a cherry hard seltzer in a plastic cup, grinning, and Elias felt the tight knot in his chest he’d carried for eight years loosen just a fraction. He didn’t snap. He didn’t mumble an excuse and leave. He leaned in a little too, so he could hear her over the noise, and said no harm done, he’d spilled worse on this jacket fighting spot fires in the Sierras back in ‘07.
She nodded, like she already knew that. She said she’d found a box of his ex-wife’s old books at the library a few months prior, the complete Jack London collection he’d bought her for their 20th anniversary, tucked on a donation shelf. She’d read them all, she said, loved the passage where London writes about watching a wildfire burn across a ridge at sunset, bright as a second sun. She’d hiked out to the old abandoned fire tower 12 miles north of town last month, she added, and seen his initials carved into the guardrail, dated 2019. She didn’t tell anyone, she said, because she knew some spots are supposed to be yours, no one else’s.
Elias’s throat went dry. No one knew about those initials. No one even knew he hiked out to that tower, it was his spot to go when the silence in his cabin felt too loud, when he missed the view from the fire lookout he’d manned for 18 years. He uncrossed his arms, let his beer bottle rest against the edge of the folding table between them, and when she laughed at his dumb joke about the fair’s grand prize pig looking exactly like the county commissioner, she reached out and touched his wrist, light and quick, her fingers calloused the same way his were, from rock climbing, she said, she spent weekends scaling the rock faces up by the national park border.
The band switched to a slower song, couples starting to sway in the open space near the stage, and Maeve tilted her head toward the tent exit. The fried Oreo stand was still open, she said, she’d been craving one all week but didn’t want to come alone and look like a loser. Elias hesitated for half a second, thought about the quiet cabin waiting for him, the stack of split wood he still had to stack, the silence he’d hidden in for almost a decade. Then he picked up his half-empty beer, tossed the crumpled napkin he’d been worrying between his fingers in the nearby trash can, and followed her out into the warm September dark, her elbow brushing his every time they stepped over a patch of uneven grass on the path to the food stalls. When she grabbed his hand to tug him past a group of teens running with cotton candy in their fists, he didn’t pull away.
