Elias Voss, 62, spent 28 years keeping the lights on at Split Rock Lighthouse before he retired three years back. His biggest flaw, if you ask his next door neighbor Marnie, is that he’s stubborn as a lake boulder when it comes to letting anyone new get close. His wife Clara died eight years ago from a sudden stroke, and he’s spent every day since holed up in his one-room cabin ten miles outside Duluth, fixing vintage fishing reels for local anglers and pretending he doesn’t get lonely. Marnie had to practically drag him to the town’s annual smoked fish festival, saying he’d turn into a total hermit if he spent another weekend talking only to his tabby cat.
He was three sips into a cheap amber ale, already plotting his escape, when he turned too fast to avoid a kid running with a cotton candy stick and sloshed half the cup down the front of a woman’s cream linen shirt. He sputtered an apology, grabbing a handful of napkins off the nearest table, and froze when she looked up. It was Lena Marlow. She’d run the lighthouse gift shop for the last ten years he’d worked there, widowed even back then, and he’d spent every one of those years carefully not looking at her too long, not smiling too wide when she left jars of her wild blackberry jam on his office doorstep, not acknowledging the warm little jump in his chest every time he heard her laugh.
The beer tent was packed tight, so they were pressed shoulder to shoulder, the rough fabric of his worn work shirt rubbing against her bare arm. She smelled like jasmine and campfire smoke, like the shoreline after a storm, and he had to force himself not to lean in. She swiped a napkin from his hand, dabbing at the wet spot on her shirt, and snickered when she saw his flustered face. “Still as clumsy as you were when you dropped that stack of postcards all over my counter in 2017, huh, Voss?”
He blinked, shocked she remembered that specific, stupid moment. He’d tripped over a display of lighthouse keychains that day, spilled 50 postcards at her feet, and spent ten minutes picking them up while she teased him, her knee brushing his every time they both reached for the same card. He’d gone home that night and felt so guilty for enjoying the contact he’d slept on the couch.
They found an empty picnic table on the edge of the tent, out of the crowd, the cold Lake Superior wind whipping strands of her gray-streaked brown hair into her face. She told him she’d moved back to Duluth six months prior, after her first grandkid was born, that she’d been working part time at the local plant nursery. He told her he still had the last jar of blackberry jam she’d given him, unopened, sitting on his kitchen shelf, because he’d thought it was too nice to waste on toast. She laughed so hard she snort-laughed, nudging his knee under the table with hers, and he didn’t move his leg away.
The sun dipped low over the lake, painting the sky streaks of tangerine and soft pink, and she shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. He didn’t even think before he pulled the wool flannel off his shoulders, the one that smelled like pine and motor oil, and handed it to her. She pulled it on, the sleeves hanging past her wrists, and rolled them up slowly, her eyes locked on his the whole time. For a second, he wanted to run. He felt like he was doing something wrong, like Clara was watching, that this quiet, thrumming tension between them was a betrayal of the 32 years they’d spent together. But then Lena leaned across the table, her thumb brushing a crumb of smoked whitefish off his chin, her fingers lingering on his jaw for three full heartbeats, and every last bit of that resistance melted away.
He admitted he used to show up to the gift shop 20 minutes early every Tuesday, just to talk to her before the tourists showed up, even though he’d lie to Clara and say he was stuck doing maintenance checks. She told him she used to leave extra jam for him, and keep his favorite saltwater taffy behind the counter, because she looked forward to seeing him just as much. He realized, sitting there with the lake wind in his hair and her knee pressed against his, that Clara had always told him she wanted him to be happy after she was gone, that he didn’t have to carry grief like a lead weight forever.
He stood up, brushing crumbs off his jeans, and held out his hand to her. “I got that jar of jam back at the cabin,” he said, his voice rougher than he meant it to be. “And a loaf of sourdough I baked this morning. You wanna come taste it?”
She smiled, lacing her fingers through his. Her palm was calloused from planting flowers, warm even in the cool wind, and it fit perfectly in his. He tugged her gently toward his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150, the sound of the festival’s bluegrass band fading behind them as the first star pricked through the pale purple dusk.
