Ronan O’Malley, 62, retired lighthouse keeper who spent 27 years tending to the Split Rock beacon on Lake Superior’s north shore, hunches over a bourbon on the rocks at Moe’s Beach Bar, the toes of his scuffed work boots propped on the lower rail of the sticky vinyl stool. He only comes here one night a year: the Sunday after the annual Copper Harbor Salmon Festival, when most of the summer tourists have packed up their RVs and the crowd is thin enough that he doesn’t have to make small talk with strangers asking for lighthouse selfies. He’s halfway through his second drink, debating if he wants to brave the 20 minute drive back to his cottage before the rain hits, when he spots her.
Maeve Sullivan, 48, Eileen’s goddaughter, the kid he’d taught to skip stones off the lighthouse dock when she was 12, leans against the bar entryway, brushing sand off the cuff of her frayed carpenter jeans. She’s in town filling a three month travel nurse shift at the local clinic, and he’s avoided running into her the entire time she’s been here, ducking behind produce displays at the grocery store, driving the long way around the clinic parking lot when he needs to pick up his blood pressure meds. He’d watched her grow up, had held her hand through Eileen’s funeral 18 years prior, had sent her a $50 check for her nursing school graduation. Attraction to her feels like a violation, a betrayal of every promise he made to his wife before she died. But before he can slide off the stool and sneak out the back door, she spots him, grins, and cuts through the scattered pool table crowds straight to his seat.
She pulls out the stool next to him, sits so close her denim-clad knee brushes his under the bar, and waves down the bartender for a pale ale. The air between them smells like fried perch, charcoal from the festival’s grills, and her perfume: cedar and wild raspberry, nothing like the lavender Eileen wore. “I was starting to think you were avoiding me,” she says, leaning in so he can hear her over the Johnny Cash track playing low on the jukebox, her shoulder pressing lightly into his flannel sleeve. Her hair is streaked with gray at the temples, pulled back in a messy braid, and there’s a smudge of charcoal on her left wrist from the festival’s art tent earlier that day. He can see the small salmon tattoo on her forearm, the one she’d called him crying about getting when she was 22, saying Eileen would’ve killed her for wasting money on ink.
He grunts, pushes his bowl of stale peanuts toward her, and tries not to fixate on the way her lips wrap around the neck of her beer bottle. He tells himself he’s being an idiot, that he’s spent so long alone he’s projecting loneliness onto the first person who’s ever bothered to seek him out. But she asks about the lighthouse’s new automated lens, laughs so hard at his story about a group of drunk tourists getting stuck on the catwalk last winter that a snort comes out, and he finds himself talking more than he has in six months combined. She leans in every time he speaks, holds eye contact a beat longer than is polite, and when she reaches across him to grab a napkin off the bar, her hand brushes the side of his neck, leaving a trail of goosebumps in its wake. He flinches like he’s been burned, and she smirks, like she knows exactly what she’s doing.
The rain hits the bar’s tin roof hard an hour later, and she mentions she’s leaving town for a new assignment in Oregon in two days, that she hasn’t been up to the lighthouse since she was 16, when she fell off the lower steps and scraped her knuckle open so bad Eileen had to drive her 45 minutes to the nearest ER. “You wanna take me up tonight?” she asks, tilting her head, the neon Pabst sign behind the bar painting her cheeks pale blue. Every sensible part of his brain screams no, that this is a line he can’t cross, that he’ll hate himself in the morning. But he nods, tosses a $20 on the bar to cover their drinks, and follows her out into the rain.
The boardwalk is slippery under their boots, the lake wind sharp enough to make her shiver, so he slips off his flannel and hands it to her. She pulls it over her t-shirt, her fingers brushing his as she adjusts the collar, and stops halfway up the lighthouse path, turning to face him. She doesn’t say anything, just reaches up, brushes a strand of gray hair off his forehead, and kisses him, salt from the lake rain on her lips, her free hand fisted in the front of his thermal shirt. He freezes for half a second, every part of him screaming that this is wrong, that he’s betraying Eileen, that Maeve is practically family. Then he kisses her back, his calloused hands resting light on her hips, the rough texture of her wool sweater under his palms, and for the first time in 18 years, he doesn’t feel the heavy weight of guilt sitting on his chest.
They climb the lighthouse stairs slow, their boots thudding against the metal rungs, and sit on the catwalk, wrapped in the same flannel, watching the northern lights start to glow pale green and purple over the black stretch of lake. She tells him about her ex-husband, who left her for a 22 year old barista three months before she took the Copper Harbor job, about how she’s been scared to let anyone get close since. He tells her about the guilt he’s carried for 18 years, that he was so focused on repairing the lighthouse beacon during a winter storm he missed Eileen’s early cancer symptoms. She doesn’t pity him, doesn’t tell him it’s not his fault, just laces her fingers through his, and sits quiet with him while the wind whips around them.
He traces the faint scar on her left knuckle, the same one she got falling off those lighthouse steps when she was 13, and lets the cold lake wind carry the last of his old guilt out over the water.
