Hollis Granger, 58, retired Forest Service fire spotter, shifts his weight from his left knee to his right and suppresses a wince. The line for Darby’s annual summer fair brisket stand wraps around three booths, and he’s already 20 minutes deep, sweat beading at the back of his neck under the brim of his faded USFS cap. He’d told himself he’d only stay an hour, grab a sandwich, head home to finish patching the leak in his Airstream’s roof, but the line moves so slow he’s half a second from bailing entirely when a warm hand taps his shoulder.
He turns, and Lena is standing so close her chest brushes his bicep when she leans around him to point at the last whole brisket sitting under the heat lamp behind the counter. She smells like coconut sunscreen and the fried Oreos she’s clearly already eaten, a smudge of powdered sugar on the corner of her mouth. Hollis’s jaw tightens. He’s spent two years deliberately avoiding one-on-one time with her—she’s his next door neighbor’s wife, Jase’s girl, Jase who’s been up in the Bakken oil fields for 11 weeks straight, who used to help Hollis split firewood before he took the rig job. It’s wrong to even look at her too long, he tells himself, wrong that he notices the way her cutoff shorts hug her hips, wrong that he likes the sound of her laugh even when it’s too loud for his quiet street.
“Last one,” she says, nodding at the brisket, her arm still brushing his. “I was gonna grab it for myself but I can’t finish a whole. Wanna split? I’ll even cover the sides.” He hesitates, his knees screaming again, and she grins, already stepping past him to flag down the guy behind the counter before he can say no. Ten minutes later they’re perched on a rickety picnic table tucked between the 4-H rabbit booth and the beer garden, a paper plate of brisket, coleslaw, and pickles between them. Lena’s knee keeps brushing his under the table, soft denim against the worn canvas of his work pants, and every time it happens he tenses up, then relaxes before he can overthink it.
She talks while they eat, complains about Jase only texting her once every three days, complains that the well at their house ran dry last week and the plumber won’t come out for another four days, asks him about the 2017 Lolo Peak fire he’s mentioned once at the VFW potluck. When he tells her he was the first spotter to call that fire in, up in the lookout 10 miles out of town, she leans in, her hand resting on his forearm, her thumb brushing the scar he has there from a falling tree branch in 2019. Her hand is warm, a tiny scratch on her knuckle from pruning her rose bushes that he’d seen her doing two days before, and he forgets what he was saying mid-sentence. The country cover band by the stage starts playing “Amarillo by Morning” somewhere behind them, kids scream on the ferris wheel, the air smells like pine from the Bitterroot Mountains looming just west of town.
When the song switches to a slow George Strait ballad, people start pairing up on the patch of grass in front of the stage. Lena wipes her hands on her shorts, stands up, holds her hand out to him. “C’mon,” she says. Hollis snorts, shakes his head. “My knees are shot,” he says. “And everyone we know is here. Carl from the VFW is already staring at us from the beer garden.” She just grins, wiggles her fingers. “I’ll lead,” she says. “And Carl’s had three IPAs, he can’t even see straight. Don’t be a coward.”
He stares at her hand for three full seconds, then takes it. His knees creak so loud when he stands up he half expects people to turn and look, but no one does. She pulls him through the crowd to the dance area, wraps her arm around his waist, rests her head on his shoulder when they start to sway, barely moving, just shifting their weight back and forth to the beat. Her hair smells like coconut still, her breath is warm against his neck, and for the first time in seven years, he doesn’t feel the urge to pull away, doesn’t feel guilty for wanting something that’s not his to take, doesn’t feel like he has to be the steady, unyielding guy everyone expects him to be. He just feels there.
The song ends a minute later, and she pulls back to look up at him, her cheeks pink from the sun, the smudge of powdered sugar still on her mouth. “I got a six pack of that cold IPA you like in my cooler back at the house,” she says, her thumb brushing the back of his hand where they’re still laced together. “My porch faces west. We can watch the sunset over the mountains.” Hollis nods, no snarky retort, no excuse about fixing his Airstream, no worry about what Jase might say if he finds out, no worry about what the town might gossip about. He just squeezes her hand, and they walk past the cotton candy booth, past the 4-H kids carrying their rabbit cages, past Carl who whoops and holds up his beer in a toast. Hollis doesn’t even bother flipping him off, he just keeps walking, his hand in hers, his knees not hurting half as bad as they did an hour before.
