Milo Rourke, 61, perched on a splintered plastic picnic table at the county fireman’s carnival beer tent, half-empty pale ale in front of him, the buddy who begged him to come bailed an hour earlier to take his grandkid to the ER for a broken arm. His hands are smudged with indigo ink from touching up an 1872 survey map of the Wisconsin northwoods he’d been working on that morning, calluses crisscrossing his fingertips from prying apart water-damaged paper frames. His scuffed work boots have a faint wood glue stain on the toe from repairing a custom oak map frame the week prior. He’d almost left ten minutes earlier, but the band launched into a cover of *Folsom Prison Blues* that sounded almost exactly like the version he and his wife Maeve used to dance to in their kitchen on Friday nights, so he stayed.
The seat next to him scrapes across the gravel before he can register the shadow falling over his table. He looks up, and it’s Lila. Maeve’s younger cousin, the one who showed up on his doorstep three months after Maeve’s funeral with a peach pie and a bottle of ibuprofen when he’d torn his meniscus fixing the gutter on his garage. He hasn’t seen her since, avoided her texts when she checked in a handful of times, convinced talking to her, let alone seeing her, was some kind of betrayal to the woman he’d been married to for 37 years. She’s 47, wears cutoff jean shorts and a faded Packers hoodie with a coffee stain on the cuff, a smudge of charcoal on the line of her jaw, her work boots caked in lake mud. “You don’t mind if I sit, right?” she says, nodding at the empty bench. “Every other table’s full of drunk teens throwing cheese curds at each other.” He nods, shifts a little to make space, his knee brushing hers when she sits down. The contact sends a jolt up his spine he hasn’t felt in years.
The air in the tent smells like fried onions and citronella, the hum of conversation wrapping around them like a worn wool blanket. She orders a hard seltzer from the passing waitress, leans in to yell her order over the band, her shoulder pressing firm into his bicep. She doesn’t move away when she’s done talking, just sits there, sipping her drink, laughing when a group of off-duty firemen walk by carrying a giant stuffed teddy bear for a kid in a neon pink cowboy hat. He finds himself telling her about the map he’s restoring, the little messy notes the original surveyor scrawled in the margins about spotting a pack of gray wolves near the shore of Lake Superior, and she listens, asks follow-up questions, remembers that he works out of his converted garage, that he’s been collecting old maps since he was a teen picking them up at garage sales for a quarter apiece. He didn’t think she’d paid attention that day at the funeral, when he’d mumbled something about his work to a dozen different people all patting his shoulder and offering half-baked condolences.
The tension builds slow, soft, no big dramatic moves. She reaches across him to grab a handful of napkins when a kid spills a root beer at the next table, her breast brushing his arm, her sun-warmed hair falling in his face, smelling like coconut shampoo and the campfire she told him she’d built at her mom’s lake cabin earlier that day. He freezes, and she pauses for half a second, her eyes locking with his, before she pulls back, wiping a smudge of soda off her forearm like nothing happened. But her face is pink, he can see it even under the warm yellow string lights strung across the tent roof. He knows he should leave, go home, watch the Brewers game he had recorded, forget this whole thing. But he doesn’t. He stays, tells her about the time Maeve convinced him to enter a pig race at this same carnival when they were 28, he lost, tripped over a hay bale and landed face first in a pile of pig manure. She laughs so hard she snorts, and the sound makes his chest feel light, a feeling he hasn’t had since Maeve took her last breath in the hospital bed in their living room.
The band wraps up their set at 10:30, the crowd dispersing, kids dragging overstuffed stuffed animals behind them, couples holding hands as they walk toward the dark parking lot. He walks her to her beat-up old Tacoma, the gravel crunching under their boots, crickets chirping loud in the tall grass along the edge of the lot, the air warm enough that he doesn’t need the flannel he tied around his waist earlier. She stops at the driver’s side door, turns to face him, her hands tucked deep in the pockets of her hoodie. “I’m heading back to Portland day after tomorrow,” she says, her voice quieter than it was earlier, almost shy. “I’ve been thinking about you since I dropped that pie off. I know it’s weird, I know you and Maeve were… I didn’t want to overstep. But I didn’t want to leave without saying something.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long beat. For four years, he’s told himself any happiness he feels that doesn’t tie back to Maeve is wrong, that he owes it to her to spend the rest of his life alone, mourning. He looks at Lila, the charcoal smudge still faint on her jaw, her hazel eyes flecked with gold, the way she’s biting her lower lip like she’s scared he’s gonna yell at her and storm off. He reaches out, brushes the charcoal off her skin with his thumb, his calloused hand lingering on her cheek for a second. She leans into the touch, her eyes fluttering closed for half a second. “I’ve been thinking about you too,” he says, and it’s the unvarnished truth, he has, more times than he’d ever admit to anyone. “I felt guilty about it. Stupid, really. Maeve would’ve told me I was being an idiot for shutting everyone out.”
She smiles, soft and a little relieved, reaches up to wrap her hand around his wrist, holding it against her face. “You wanna come back to the cabin?” she asks. “I’ve got that peach pie leftover, and a bottle of bourbon Maeve’s dad hid in the pantry back in 2019. I haven’t had the heart to drink it alone.” He nods, no hesitation this time. She opens the passenger door for him, and he climbs in, the seats smelling like pine air freshener and the bag of ripe peaches she picked from her mom’s tree that morning, sitting on the floor by his feet. She turns the key, the radio cutting on to a Patsy Cline song Maeve used to sing in the shower, and she reaches across the console, lacing her fingers through his, her palm warm and a little rough from hauling firewood earlier that day. She pulls out of the parking lot, turning toward the lake road, and he doesn’t look back.
