Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 27 years keeping the remote Whitefish Point lighthouse on Lake Superior before retiring two years prior, and he’d made a point of staying out of the small northern Michigan town’s gossip mill ever since. His biggest flaw? He’d built a wall so thick around himself after his wife Eileen died of ovarian cancer eight years prior, he barely even said hello to the regulars at The Rusty Buoy, the only dive bar within 15 miles that served bourbon strong enough to cut the lake chill. He was there the Saturday of the annual apple harvest festival, perched on his usual end stool, sipping a neat Knob Creek, ignoring the crowd of flannel-clad tourists yelling over the Johnny Cash jukebox, when she sat down two stools over.
The bar was packed, so when she leaned forward to set her hard cider on the sticky counter, her elbow brushed the bicep of his faded gray flannel. He caught a whiff of cedar and vanilla shampoo, no heavy flowery perfume, no hairspray fumes, just something clean, like the shoreline after a rain. He glanced over before he could stop himself. She was Elara Voss, 58, the new town librarian who’d moved from Chicago three months prior, the woman every local guy his age had written off as untouchable. The rumor mill had cranked into overdrive the second she’d turned down the diner owner’s offer to help her carry boxes of books into the tiny library: she’d left her husband for a younger woman, she hated men, she thought the entire town was a backwater hick dump. Ronan had rolled his eyes at the gossip at the time, but he’d avoided her anyway, didn’t want to be the latest punchline at the Tuesday morning breakfast crew’s table.
She caught him staring, and didn’t look away. She wore a crisp cream linen blouse even though the bar smelled like fried cheese curds and old beer, wire-rimmed glasses that slipped down her nose, and he spotted a tiny black lighthouse tattoo peeking out from under the cuff of her blouse when she pushed her glasses up. “You gonna keep staring, or you gonna tell me if that bourbon’s as good as it looks?” she said, her voice lower than he expected, dry, no saccharine sweetness, no pitying lilt people usually used when they talked to the widowed lighthouse guy.
He hesitated for half a second, thought about the guys at the boat launch who’d already nodded at him twice, raised their eyebrows like they were placing bets on whether he’d shoot his shot. Disgust curled in his gut at the idea of being the talk of the town for the next month, but something in her half-smirk made him push his glass a half inch toward her. “Tastes better than the swill they serve at the festival beer tent,” he said.
They talked for an hour. She’d gotten the lighthouse tattoo after her first solo kayak trip across Whitefish Bay the month prior, she told him, when she’d gotten caught in a surprise squall and had used the old lighthouse beacon to navigate back to shore. She’d left her husband, yes, but not for a grad student—she’d left because he’d spent 30 years treating her like a piece of furniture, like she didn’t have any wants or needs outside of grading his papers and packing his lunch. She hated the town’s obsession with apple cider donuts, thought they were too sweet, too greasy, which made Ronan snort so loud the bartender glanced over. When he told her about the time he’d rescued a group of drunk teen kayakers who’d drifted 10 miles out into the lake in the middle of the night, she laughed so hard she tapped the back of his hand with her cold, cider-chilled fingers. Her fingertips were calloused, he noticed, from turning thousands of book pages, had a tiny smudge of blue ink on the side of her index finger.
The crowd thinned out around 10, the tourists heading back to their Airbnbs, and the few remaining local regulars kept glancing over at them, whispering into their beers. Ronan almost pulled his hand away, almost made an excuse to leave, go home to his empty cottage and his half-finished outboard motor repair, but then she leaned in closer, her knee brushing his under the bar, no apology, just held his eye contact. The moon was bright over the lake, she said, her cottage was a mile up the shore, she had a first edition of *The Old Man and the Sea* on her bookshelf he might want to look at. He’d mentioned offhand 20 minutes earlier that Eileen had given him a tattered copy of that book for their first date, that he’d lost it in a flood at the lighthouse 10 years prior.
He thought about the gossip, about the old biddies at the library who would see them walking up the shore, about the jokes the breakfast crew would crack all next week. Then he looked at her, at the gold flecks in her hazel eyes, at the tiny smudge of ink on her finger, and he didn’t care. He slid off the stool, dropped a $20 on the bar to cover both their drinks, and held the door open for her.
The wind off the lake was sharp, bit at their cheeks, carried the sound of waves lapping at the sandy shore. She slipped her hand into his halfway down the road, her palm cold from the wind, and his calloused hand, rough from 27 years cranking lighthouse lenses and fixing boat motors, wrapped around hers easy, like they’d been doing it for years. They stopped on her porch, the light from the porch lamp gilding the edges of her hair, and she leaned in, kissed him slow, tasted like cinnamon and hard cider. He didn’t even notice the first flurries of the season swirling around them until she pulled back, nodded toward the door.
He followed her over the threshold, the screen door slamming shut behind them before the first snowflakes could stick to the weathered cedar porch rail.
