Rafe Marquez, 53, builds custom fly rods for a living out of a cinder block workshop behind his cabin outside Boone, North Carolina. He spent 19 years as a backcountry park ranger before walking away from the job a year after his wife left him for a marketing executive in Charlotte, and he’s spent the seven years since cultivating a deliberate kind of hermitage—only leaving the property once a week to sell rod blanks and wildflower honey at the downtown farmers market, grab a bourbon and a bacon cheeseburger at the dive bar off King Street, and avoid any conversation that feels like it might lead to more than small talk. His biggest flaw, if you ask the few friends he still talks to, is that he’s convinced he’s too set in his grumpy, calloused ways to make room for anyone new, so he doesn’t even try.
It’s late September, the air sharp enough to nip the tip of his nose when the wind picks up, and most of the market vendors are packing up their stalls for the day when he spots her. He recognizes her immediately, even though it’s been eight years since he last saw her at his ex-wife’s family Christmas dinner. Elara, his ex’s younger cousin, 48, who used to drive up from Miami every summer to hike the trails, who always laughed at his terrible campfire jokes even when no one else did, who he’d spent half his marriage quietly avoiding because the way she looked at him made his chest feel tight in a way he knew was wrong. She’s wearing worn high-waisted jeans, a bluegrass band tee faded almost to white, a red flannel tied around her waist, and there’s a smudge of charcoal on the edge of her jaw, probably from helping the potter two stalls over pack up her mugs. Her hair is streaked with silver now, pulled back in a loose braid, and when she grins and walks toward his stall, his throat goes dry.
She says she just moved to town last week, took a nurse practitioner job at the local clinic, and had no idea he was still living here. She leans against the edge of his folding table, and when she reaches for a jar of his wildflower honey to read the label, her elbow brushes his forearm, light enough that he almost thinks he imagines it. He smells jasmine shampoo and pine on her, hears the way her voice drops when she says she always thought he got a raw deal from her cousin, that she never understood why anyone would leave the mountains, leave him, for a cubicle and a fancy apartment downtown. He shifts his weight, his work boots scuffing the dirt, because part of him is screaming that this is a line he can’t cross, that family is off limits, that everyone in town would talk if they found out, but the other part of him is buzzing, like he hasn’t felt this awake in years.
He doesn’t say no when she asks if he wants to get that drink she knows he always gets after the market. They sit in a booth in the back of the bar, the neon Pabst sign glowing pink on her face, and split an order of fried pickles so greasy the paper soaks through in five minutes. She steals a fry off his plate without asking, and when he passes her the second bourbon he ordered for her, their fingers brush, and she doesn’t pull away. She leans in across the booth, so close he can feel her warm breath on his neck, and says she’s had a crush on him since she was 22 and came to his wedding, that she never said anything because he was off limits, but now there’s no rule book to follow, no one who gets a say in what they do except them.
He freezes for half a second, then reaches out, brushes the charcoal smudge off her jaw with his calloused thumb, and lets his hand linger on her cheek long enough that she leans into it. The bartender is busy wiping down the counter, no one is paying them any mind, and for the first time in seven years, he doesn’t feel the urge to run. They leave the bar an hour later, the air cold enough that he hands her his wool work flannel, and she slips it on, it’s too big, falls to her mid-thigh, and she tugs the collar up around her neck to block the wind. His hound dog Mabel is asleep in the back of his beat up Ford truck, doesn’t even stir when he turns the key in the ignition. He drives her to her new cabin first, it’s only three miles down the road from his place, and when she asks him to come inside to help her hang the bird feeder she bought at the market that morning, he nods, already reaching for the door handle.
