Elias Thorne is 61, a custom fly rod builder who runs his one-man shop out of a converted garage on 10 acres of scrub oak and pine outside Grand Junction, Colorado. He’s avoided anything resembling casual connection since his wife left him for a Denver real estate agent 12 years prior, convinced anyone who strikes up unplanned conversation is either after a free rod repair or gossip to spread at the local diner. The only time he ventures into town regularly is Saturday mornings for the farmers market, where he picks up a half gallon of peach cider and a loaf of sourdough, no detours, no small talk, usually back on his property by 10 a.m.
It’s 87 degrees on the last Saturday of August, the air thick with the scent of roasted green chiles, ripe Palisade peaches, and fresh cut hay from the field adjacent to the market parking lot. A bluegrass trio plays “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” off to the side, their banjo player missing a front tooth, and a 4-H chicken has escaped its pen, darting between shoppers’ legs while a red-faced 10-year-old chases after it. Elias is third in line for cider, wearing his usual faded Carhartt shirt with a solder burn on the left cuff, when a woman reaches past him for a jar of wildflower honey stacked on the table next to the cider stand. Her warm forearm brushes his bicep, the linen of her shirt soft as dried grass, and he tenses immediately, ready to brush off whatever plea for a favor or awkward small talk is coming.
She pulls back with a low, rough laugh, streaks of silver catching the sun in her auburn hair, chipped sage-green nail polish glinting on her fingers. “Sorry about that. That honey’s been haunting me all week, I swear I didn’t plan to body check you.” She’s the new part-time librarian, he remembers, saw her name tag pinned to her shirt at the diner last month: Clara. He mumbles a half-hearted “no problem” and turns back to the line, but she stays planted next to him, her tote slung over one shoulder crammed with library holds and a half-eaten peach turnover, the sweet scent of it mixing with the lavender hand cream she wears. He’s suddenly hyper-aware of how close she’s standing, their shoulders inches apart, no personal space buffer like every other shopper in the market gives him.
He expects her to ask about his shop, mention she saw his hand-painted sign off the highway, ask for a discount on a rod for her kid or grandkid. Instead, she rants about the library board’s new 10-cent per day overdue fee for children’s books, saying half the single parents in town can barely afford gas, let alone late fines for a dog-eared copy of *Charlotte’s Web*. He finds himself nodding, volunteering that he checked out so many Louis L’Amour books from the old bookmobile as a kid he still owes the county close to $40 in late fees, and the librarian back then just told him as long as he was reading, she didn’t care. Clara laughs so hard she snorts a little, her elbow bumping his when she leans forward to wave at the 4-H kid who finally caught the chicken.
They get their cider orders at the same time, and when she mentions she has her dad’s old 1972 fly reel sitting in her closet, the drag busted for three years, no one in town knows how to fix it, he surprises himself by offering to take a look. “Stop by the shop tomorrow around 3,” he says, digging a scrap of receipt out of his pocket to scribble his address on. She grins, tucks the paper into her tote, and writes her cell number on the back of a library hold slip, shoving it into the chest pocket of his Carhartt, her knuckles brushing the thin cotton of his t-shirt underneath for half a second. He feels a jolt run up his spine, tells himself it’s just the sun baking the back of his neck, nothing more.
Clara shows up at 2:45 the next day, the old reel in a scuffed leather case, a jar of that wildflower honey and a Tupperware of oatmeal raisin cookies in her tote. The shop smells like cedar shavings and epoxy, Johnny Cash playing low on the vintage radio he found at a garage sale last year, and she wanders the racks of half-finished rod blanks while he works, running a finger along the grain of a cedar piece he’d been carving for a client in Wyoming. He fixes the reel in 10 minutes, stands behind her to show her how to adjust the new drag, his chest almost pressing to her back, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t step back like he usually does when someone gets that close. When he offers to take her up to the small trout creek on his property the next weekend to test it out, she says yes before he even finishes the sentence.
They drive up to the creek Saturday morning in his beat-up Ford F150, windows rolled down, sage and pine drifting through the cab, Clara singing along to every word of the Merle Haggard song on the radio. He ties a size 16 elk hair caddis to the line for her, shows her how to hold the rod, how to flick her wrist to cast. Her first cast goes 20 feet out, perfectly placed in a slow eddy, and 10 seconds later she’s whooping so loud a flock of Canada geese takes off from the bank, a 12-inch rainbow trout tugging at the end of the line. She reels it in careful, holds it up for a second before slipping it back into the water, her cheeks pink from the sun, grinning so wide her eyes crinkle at the corners.
He pulls a cold lime seltzer from the cooler slung over his shoulder, hands it to her, their fingers brushing when she takes it, warm from the sun and the heat of the reel. He leans against the gnarled trunk of a willow tree next to her, watching the sunlight ripple over the smooth, rounded river stones in the current, no urge to make an excuse to leave, no quiet fear that he’s gonna say the wrong thing and run her off. He pulls a crumpled pack of peppermints from his jeans pocket, holds one out to her, and for the first time in longer than he can remember, he’s looking forward to whatever comes next.
