Elias Voss, 58, spent 32 years as a Sierra Nevada forest fire spotter, holed up 7,000 feet up in a cinder block lookout tower, talking to no one but the occasional park ranger and the family of ravens that nested on his railing. His only consistent flaw, if you asked his late wife Clara, was that he’d rather outwait a thunderstorm alone than ask for a hand holding a tarp. He’d avoided the annual Truckee street fair for seven straight years, ever since Clara’s ovarian cancer took her, sick of the tight, pitying smiles from old coworkers, the awkward pats on the shoulder that felt like they were pressing him further into the grief he’d wrapped around himself like a well-worn flannel. His doctor had threatened to put him on low-dose anxiety meds if he didn’t leave his cabin for something other than grocery runs and firewood hauls, so he’d showed up, baseball cap pulled low, hands stuffed in his jeans pockets, planning to grab a smoked turkey leg and leave before anyone recognized him.
The smell hit him first, sweet and sharp, peach and cinnamon with a faint undercurrent of bourbon, cutting through the scent of grilled corn and diesel from the food trucks idling at the end of the block. He stopped in front of a rough-hewn wooden booth stacked with mason jars of jam, handwritten labels scrawled in looping blue ink. The woman behind the booth looked up from wiping down a counter, her dark hair streaked with gray pulled back in a braid, sun freckles dusting her nose, and he knew her before she opened her mouth. Mara Ruiz, 52, the cousin of his college roommate, the woman he’d made out with in the back of a beat-up Chevy pickup at his cousin’s wedding 22 years earlier, two weeks before he’d asked Clara to marry him. He’d thought about that night exactly four times in the intervening decades, each time stabbing himself with a twist of guilt so sharp he’d change the subject in his own head before he could remember the way her laugh had sounded when he’d tripped over a hay bale on the way to the truck.
She leaned over the booth edge, her soft cotton flannel shirt brushing the jar of peach jam in front of him, and held out a small plastic sample spoon. When he reached for it, their fingers brushed, and he felt the rough callus on her index finger, the same one she’d told him came from years of canning with her grandma, back when they’d sat on that truck tailgate drinking 3-dollar beer. He noticed the scar on his own left knuckle, from the chainsaw accident he’d rambled about that night, catch the sun, and she smiled, slow, like she was remembering the exact same story. “I thought that was you,” she said, her voice a little raspier than he remembered, from years of working out in the high elevation wind, he guessed. “Heard you were still out in that cabin off Highway 89. Didn’t want to bug you, figured you liked your space.”
He froze, half wanting to mumble an excuse and walk away, half rooted to the spot, the taste of peach bourbon jam bursting across his tongue when he licked the sample spoon. It was perfect, not too sweet, exactly the way he liked it, and he realized he hadn’t talked to anyone who wasn’t a grocery store cashier for longer than five minutes in three months. He told himself he was only staying because he didn’t want to be rude, that he’d buy a jar and leave, no harm done, but when she leaned in further to move a jar of blackberry jam out of the direct sun, her elbow brushed his forearm, and the warmth of her skin seeped through the thin fabric of his t-shirt, sending a jolt up his arm he hadn’t felt since Clara got sick. The bluegrass band two booths over struck up a cover of a Johnny Cash song he and Clara used to dance to in their kitchen after dinner, and he felt the guilt twist in his chest again, sharp as a pine needle. He should leave. He had no business talking to a woman he’d once kissed when he was supposed to be building a life with someone else, no business liking the way her eyes crinkled at the corners when she teased him about still wearing the same beat-up Red Wing boots he’d had back in the 90s.
“I kept a batch of this peach bourbon aside for you every year since I moved here three years ago,” she said, tapping the top of a jar with a little star drawn next to the label, before he could make his excuse to leave. “Heard from your old roommate you liked bourbon in just about everything. Figured you’d show up eventually.” He stared at her, the guilt warring with the warm, fuzzy feeling that someone had thought about him, even a little, without pitying him, for years. “I told Clara about that night, you know,” he said, before he could think better of it. “Our first anniversary. She laughed. Said if I ever ran into you, I owed you a drink.” Mara’s smile softened, no teasing left, and she reached across the booth, squeezing his wrist lightly, her palm warm and calloused against his skin. “Then you can pay up after the fair closes,” she said. “The dive bar down on Main Street has good cold IPA, and the bartender leaves us alone if we sit in the back booth.”
They sat in that back booth for two hours, talking about the forest service, her 10-acre peach orchard, Clara’s obsession with growing heirloom tomatoes that never ripened before the first frost, the way the ravens that used to nest on his lookout tower would bring him shiny bits of trash if he left them peanut butter crackers. Their knees brushed under the table a dozen times, each accidental contact sending a little spark up his spine, and he didn’t flinch away, didn’t feel guilty, not even when she laughed so hard she snort-laughed, the exact same way she had that night 22 years ago. When the bartender turned the overhead lights up to signal closing, he walked her to her beat-up old Ford pickup, the jar of jam tucked under his arm. She leaned in before she climbed in, kissing him on the cheek slow, so he could smell the lavender of her shampoo and the faint taste of peach on her breath, and she told him she had a peach pie cooling on her kitchen windowsill if he wanted to stop by later. He dug his phone out of his pocket as soon as her taillights disappeared around the corner, pulled up the notes app where he kept his grocery list, and typed “vanilla ice cream” at the top, because pie was always better with a scoop on the side.
