Ronan Voss, 58, ran his calloused thumb along the hickory handle of a restored 1960s felling axe, the grain smooth as worn leather under his skin. He’d been a smokejumper for 22 years, until a bad turn in a 2011 Northern California wildfire left his left forearm crisscrossed with thin, silvery scars and his jump partner cold in the brush. That same year his wife left him for a Portland real estate developer, so he’d retreated to the half-acre plot they’d bought in the Oregon Cascades when they were 28, built a cinder block workshop out of salvaged lumber, and spent the next 12 years restoring old axes for a small, loyal online customer base, only leaving the property twice a week for coffee at the diner and once a month for the town flea market. He hated the new transplants moving into the old cabins, driving up property prices, taking photos of every deer they saw for Instagram instead of learning how to fix their own leaky roofs.
He saw her coming from 20 feet away, the new woman who’d moved into the A-frame three miles down the road two weeks prior. She was wearing a well-worn charcoal wool coat, scuffed work boots, her gray-streaked brown hair pulled back in a loose braid. He tensed up, already ready to brush her off with a gruff “these aren’t decorative” before she even opened her mouth. Most transplants only wanted axes to hang above their fireplaces, no interest in how they balanced, how sharp the edge could get if you knew what you were doing.
She stopped a foot from his table, leaned in slightly to look at the small hatchet he’d set out front, and her shoulder brushed his scarred forearm. He flinched, not from pain, but from the unexpected warmth of her through the thin fabric of his flannel. She pulled back immediately, eyes wide. “Sorry, didn’t mean to crowd you. That hatchet’s a Collins, right? 1970s?”
Ronan blinked. Most people couldn’t tell a Collins from a no-name hardware store axe. He nodded. “Yeah. Restored the handle last week, replaced the wedge.”
She smiled, crinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes, and held his gaze for a beat longer than polite, no awkward look away. “I’m Elara. Moved into the old Miller place. I’ve been looking for a small hatchet for splitting kindling, and all the ones at the hardware store are garbage. I saw your sign when I was walking my golden retriever last week, the hand-painted one by your driveway?”
He grunted, still wary, but reached for the hatchet to hand it to her at the same time she did. Their fingers brushed, both calloused—his from years of swinging axes and filing edges, hers from digging in the overgrown garden at her A-frame, he guessed, from the dirt under her short, unpolished nails. The contact sent a jolt up his arm he hadn’t felt in over a decade. He almost dropped the hatchet.
The air smelled like roasted corn from the food stand two booths over, pine from the surrounding woods, the faint, sweet scent of lavender from whatever sachet she had in her coat pocket. The crowd hummed low around them, kids yelling as they chased each other with cotton candy, a bluegrass band playing off to the side of the market field. She hefted the hatchet in her hand, tested the balance, nodded like she approved. “This is perfect. How much?”
Ronan named his price, half off what he usually charged, before he even thought about it. He felt stupid, angry at himself for breaking his own rule about not giving transplants special treatment, for the way his pulse was racing like he was 19 again, about to jump out of a plane for the first time. He hated that he wanted her to stay, wanted to ask her more questions, instead of taking her money and sending her on her way.
She pulled her wallet out of her coat pocket, handed him the cash, then pulled a glass jar full of dark purple jam out of her tote bag, set it on the table between them. “I made this last weekend, from the blackberries growing along the trail behind my place. I saw your bushes are overgrown by your workshop, figured you might like it. I also… I’ve been trying to learn how to sharpen my own gardening tools, and I’m terrible at it. I’d pay you, obviously, if you had time to show me sometime.”
Ronan stared at the jam jar, the label handwritten in loopy cursive, and the part of him that had spent 12 years building walls, that wanted to tell her he didn’t take favors from strangers, that he didn’t have time to teach people basic skills, warred with the part of him that ached to have someone in his workshop who actually cared about working with their hands, who didn’t see him as the weird, grumpy ex-smokejumper who lived alone in the woods. The disgust at his own weakness, at the thought of letting someone in, tangled up with the sharp, warm desire to hear her laugh, to show her the stack of old axe heads he’d collected over the years, to tell her about the jump that left the scars on his arm, if she asked.
He picked up the jam jar, his fingers brushing hers again when he took it, and this time neither of them pulled away. “Market closes in 45 minutes. You can hang around, I’ll show you how to sharpen that hatchet first, then we can talk about the gardening tools. I got fresh coffee on the pot at the shop.”
Her smile widened, bright enough to cut through the crisp October chill, and she leaned against the table next to him, not crowding, close enough that he could still smell the lavender on her coat. They made small talk while he helped an older local man pick out a splitting axe, Elara chiming in with a joke about how her ex-husband had once tried to split wood and almost cut his foot off, and Ronan laughed, a rough, rusty sound he hadn’t heard come out of his own mouth in years.
When the last customer left, he packed up the remaining axes into his old wooden crate, slung it over his shoulder, and Elara tucked the hatchet into her tote, held the jam jar tight against her chest. They walked down the dirt road toward his place, the sun dipping low behind the pine trees, painting the sky pink and orange, their elbows brushing every few steps. He didn’t move away. When she reached up to brush a stray pine needle off the collar of his flannel, he didn’t flinch, for the first time in 12 years.
