Arthur Gaudet, 62, has restored antique maps for 38 years out of a clapboard shop on Main Street in central Vermont, and he’s never once touched a digital restoration tool. He still uses the same brass magnifying loupe his father gave him for college graduation, still mends paper tears with rice paste he makes from scratch every Sunday, still avoids most town events like they carry a contagious rash. The only reason he’s at the fire department’s annual chili cookoff is his best friend, a retired logger named Joe, threatened to leave a load of pine sap on his shop doorstep if he skipped another public appearance.
He’s leaning against a splintered pine picnic table, sweating through the cuffs of his gray flannel, when he takes a bite of the venison chili Joe entered and nearly chokes. It’s spiked with ghost pepper, he realizes too late, his eyes watering so bad he can barely make out the string of fairy lights strung between the fire station’s bay doors. A low, warm laugh pulls his gaze up, and there’s Elara Voss, the woman who opened the herbal apothecary two blocks over six months prior, holding a half-pint jar of wildflower honey out to him.
He’d avoided her entirely up until that point, buying into the town gossip that painted her as a flighty, man-eating hippie who’d left her husband for a 20-something farm hand before moving to town. He’d written her off as the kind of person who sold overpriced CBD gummies to bored soccer moms and ranted about “toxic energy” at town hall meetings, and he’d crossed the street twice to avoid waving at her when they’d passed each other on the sidewalk. Now she’s standing a foot away, her work boots caked in mud, her dark hair streaked with gray pulled back in a messy braid, and she’s not breaking eye contact.
He reaches for the jar, and their fingers brush. He feels the rough callus on the side of her index finger, the kind you get from gripping pruning shears for hours at a time, and the skin on the back of his neck prickles. She smells like lavender and cedar and burnt sugar, nothing like the rose perfume his wife wore for 34 years before she died of lung cancer three years prior. He mumbles a thanks, unscrews the jar, and dabs a finger of honey into his chili, and she sits down on the picnic bench next to him, her knee barely an inch from his.
She tells him she recognized the 1792 map of Lake Champlain he’d propped in his shop window the week prior, that she’d studied 18th century cartography at UVM before she switched her major to botany. She lists off the unmarked coves on the western shore that most map restorers miss, and he finds himself leaning in, his shoulder almost touching hers, talking about the water damage he’s been fighting on that exact map for three weeks. He hasn’t talked about his work to anyone who isn’t a fellow map nerd in a Facebook group he pretends he doesn’t belong to in years.
The fire department blares the station siren to announce the chili contest winner, and the crowd surges forward, a group of teen boys knocking into Elara hard enough that she falls into his chest. He catches her by the elbows, his palms warm through the thin fabric of her flannel, her hair brushing his jaw, and for half a second he freezes, waiting for the familiar guilt he feels any time he even thinks about being close to another woman to kick in. It doesn’t. She looks up at him, her brown eyes crinkling at the corners, and she doesn’t move away, not even when the crowd settles back down.
She tells him the gossip is garbage, that she left her ex-husband after he embezzled $80,000 from her first apothecary to fund his gambling habit, that she moved to Vermont to get away from the mess and the rumors that followed her in her old town. He nods, feels stupid for buying into the garbage the ladies at the post office had been whispering about for months, and he apologizes for avoiding her. She waves it off, grinning, says she’d noticed, thought he was just a grumpy old guy who hated anyone under 70.
When the cookoff wraps up an hour later, she tugs a slip of thick, cream-colored paper out of her jacket pocket, writes her number on it in dark green ink, and hands it to him. She says she has a 1789 survey journal from a French fur trapper that has notes on all those unmarked Lake Champlain coves, and he’s welcome to bring the map by her shop any time after 10 a.m. tomorrow, she’ll make him chamomile tea that doesn’t taste like dish soap.
He tucks the slip of paper into the front pocket of his work jeans, right next to his brass magnifying loupe, and walks back to his shop with a half-full jar of her honey in his other hand. He doesn’t stop to chat with anyone on the walk, his head spinning a little, shocked that he didn’t make up an excuse to leave the cookoff early, shocked that he’s already planning on waking up 20 minutes early tomorrow to wrap the map in acid-free paper to bring over. He takes a slow sip of the leftover chili he’d stuffed in his jacket pocket, sweet now with the honey she’d given him, and for the first time in months, he’s looking forward to the end of the workday tomorrow.
