Roland Voss, 53, spent 18 years as a smokejumper before a 2018 Boundary Waters blaze that took three of his crew convinced him he was better off alone. Now he runs a one-man firewood delivery service out of his off-grid cabin outside Grand Marais, Minnesota, only leaving the woods to drop off loads or grab a bourbon neat at The Pines bar every Wednesday night. He’s got a scar slicing through his left eyebrow from a falling branch, calluses so thick he can pick up a hot log barehanded without flinching, and a strict rule against letting anyone get close enough to ask about the dog tags he wears tucked under his flannel, the ones engraved with his dead crewmates’ initials.
The Wednesday after the first hard frost of the season, he’s slouched in his usual corner booth, boots caked with slush, when the door swings open and a woman he’s never seen before steps inside. She’s wrapped in a navy wool peacoat, a constellation-print scarf knotted tight around her neck, scuffed leather work boots caked with the same mud he’s been trekking through all day, and a stack of hardcover books tucked under one arm. She pauses just inside the door, shaking snow out of her auburn hair, and scans the room until her eyes land on him.
He tenses, already prepping the line he uses to brush off people who beg for last-minute wood deliveries: booked solid for two weeks, find someone else. But she’s already walking over, her boots thudding soft against the scuffed linoleum, and when she stops at the edge of his booth, he smells pine and old paper and cinnamon gum drifting off her, sharp and warm all at once.
“Roland?” she says, and he blinks. No one except the old bartender uses his first name, everyone else just calls him the wood guy. “I’m Clara. I’m the new librarian at the town branch. I just moved into that old cottage on Oak Street, the one with the stone fireplace? My furnace died yesterday, and the HVAC guy can’t get out for three days. My pipes are this close to freezing.” She holds up her thumb and index finger an inch apart, and he notices her knuckles are chapped raw, like she’s been hauling firewood scraps from the side of the road herself.
He opens his mouth to repeat his canned line, but she leans in to set her stack of books on the edge of the booth, and her elbow brushes his forearm. The warmth of her skin seeps through the thin flannel of his shirt, and his jaw tightens. He hasn’t been touched by anyone who wasn’t a lumber yard worker clapping him on the back in two and a half years. She pulls back fast, cheeks flushing, and mumbles an apology, and he notices her hazel eyes are flecked with gold, like sunlight through amber.
“I asked Marnie at the bar who did the most reliable deliveries,” she says, twisting the edge of her scarf between her fingers, like she’s already bracing for him to turn her down. “She said you don’t do last-minute calls, but I… I looked up the old articles about that 2018 fire. I know you don’t love talking to people. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t an emergency.”
That stops him cold. No one’s ever bothered to dig that deep, to explain why they’re asking for a favor instead of just demanding it. Most people see the scar, the calluses, the quiet, and write him off as a grumpy hermit who doesn’t care if someone freezes. He stares at her for a long minute, the buzz of the bar’s jukebox playing old Johnny Cash fading into the background, and he finds himself nodding before he can think better of it.
“Seven AM tomorrow,” he says, and her face lights up, a grin spreading across her face that makes his chest feel tight, like he’s just carried a 100 pound log up three flights of stairs. “I’ll bring two cords of hardwood, enough to last you through the week until the furnace guy shows.”
She pulls a crumpled slip of paper out of her coat pocket, scribbled with her address, and presses it into his palm. Her fingers linger for half a second longer than necessary, soft against his rough skin, and he tucks the paper into the inside pocket of his flannel, right over his dog tags, before she can see how his hands are shaking a little. She says she’ll have coffee ready, black, the way Marnie told her he likes it, and fresh apple cider donuts from the bakery down Main Street, and then she waves and heads back out into the snow.
He sits there for another hour, nursing his bourbon, staring at the door she left through, and for the first time in years, he doesn’t dread getting up before dawn the next day. He stops by the lumber yard on his way home, grabs an extra bundle of birch logs, the kind that burn slow and smell like honey, and tosses it in the bed of his truck.
When he pulls up to her cottage at 6:58 AM the next day, the porch light is on, and he can smell coffee drifting through the cracked kitchen window before he even turns off the truck. He grabs the first load of wood, carries it up to the porch, and knocks. She opens the door thirty seconds later, wearing a faded red flannel that’s too big for her, fuzzy sheep socks, no shoes, holding a steaming mug of coffee out to him. The donuts are stacked on a plate on the kitchen table behind her, and the whole cottage smells like vanilla and burnt sugar. He sets the stack of wood down by the door, steps inside, and the door clicks shut behind him.
