He twists to get out of the way of a group of teens carrying a stack of plastic cups, and his elbow slams into someone’s shoulder, half his IPA sloshing over the rim onto a pair of dark high-waisted jeans. He starts to apologize, and looks up to see Margot Hale, the new county librarian who’d shown up at his lighthouse four weeks prior, hauling three canvas tote bags full of old shipping logs, asking if she could look through his personal archives for a library exhibit on 19th century Lake Superior shipwrecks. She’s wearing a red flannel shirt rolled up to her elbows, a smudge of blue ink on her left cheek, and she’s laughing, not mad, swiping at the wet spot on her jeans with a crumpled napkin. “Relax, Voss,” she says, and he’s surprised she remembers his name. “I’ve spilled far worse on these pants at book club wine nights.”
He offers to buy her a replacement drink, and she nods, sliding onto the bar stool next to him, close enough that her shoulder brushes his when she leans in to yell her order over the band. He tenses up at first. He knows who she is, or at least who she was married to: Jake Carter, his old Coast Guard partner, the guy he’d stopped talking to 15 years prior after Jake threw him under the bus to get a promotion he didn’t deserve. For a second he feels a sharp twist of guilt, like he’s breaking some unwritten bro code just sitting next to her, even though he hasn’t spoken to Jake in more than a decade, even though he’d heard through the grapevine last year that Jake left her for a realtor from Milwaukee half his age. He almost makes an excuse to leave, but then she passes him a jar of dill pickles from the bar counter, her fingers brushing his for half a second, calloused from the raised bed gardening she’d mentioned when she was at the lighthouse, and he stays.
They talk for 45 minutes, leaning in closer every time the band cranks up the volume. She teases him about the hand-painted “NO TRESPASSING” sign he has nailed to his lighthouse porch, the one with a crudely drawn seagull holding a steak knife, and he teases her about the fact that she brought a granola bar shaped like a shark to her research visit, which she’d shared with him when he forgot to eat lunch. She admits she’d looked him up before she drove out to the lighthouse, had heard Jake talk about him for years, all the stories about the time they rescued a group of kayakers stuck in a November gale, the time they got stuck on a channel buoy for three hours because their boat died mid-patrol. “I always thought Jake was an idiot for cutting you off,” she says, and her hand lands on his wrist, warm and firm, when she says it. He doesn’t pull away. The guilt that was sitting heavy in his chest ten minutes earlier has melted into something lighter, something that makes his ears go pink, something he hasn’t felt since his wife died eight years prior.
They sneak out the back of the tent when he spots his cousin Linda craning her neck looking for him, ducking behind a stack of hay bales to avoid being seen, both of them laughing so quiet their shoulders shake. He sits down on a weathered picnic bench half-hidden by jack pine trees, and she sits right next to him, not across, their knees pressing together through their denim jeans. The wind off the lake is sharp and cold, and he smells lavender hand soap and campfire smoke on her hair when she leans in to tell him she’s been working on the shipwreck exhibit every night for two months, that she’s been wanting to ask him to come look at the draft of it but was scared he’d turn her down. He admits he’s been avoiding the library because he didn’t want to run into her, because he was scared he’d make a fool of himself, scared everyone in town would start gossiping about the old reclusive lighthouse keeper hitting on the new librarian, scared he was too set in his ways to let anyone new into his quiet, predictable life.
The band inside the tent starts playing “Free Fallin’”, the sound floating through the pine boughs, soft and fuzzy around the edges. She tilts her head up at him, her eyes glinting in the string lights strung between the trees, and asks if he wants to go get blueberry pie at the diner up the highway, the one that’s open 24 hours, no pressure, just to talk more about the shipwreck logs, or whatever else they feel like. He doesn’t hesitate. He stands up, brushes pine needles off the back of his heavy canvas work pants, and offers her his hand. She takes it, her palm warm and a little rough from weeding her vegetable garden, fitting perfectly in his. He doesn’t care if Linda sees them, doesn’t care if the guys from the fish plant talk about it at the bait shop next week, doesn’t care about the stupid old grudge he carried against Jake for half his life. He tucks her cold hand into the pocket of his frayed work jacket as they cross the gravel parking lot, the distant sound of the festival fading behind them.
