Elias Thorne, 58, spent 26 years as a smokejumper before a shattered ankle and a bad fire that took two of his crew pushed him into early retirement. Now he runs a 30-acre maple syrup operation outside of Burlington, Vermont, and his biggest personality flaw is that he’s mastered the art of vanishing before any conversation gets past small talk. His ex-wife left him 14 years prior, said he cared more about chasing wildfires than he did about her, and he never bothered arguing. He likes the quiet. Likes the rhythm of tapping trees, boiling sap, the only noise in his cabin the hum of the old country radio and the crackle of the cast-iron wood stove.
He’s manning his booth at the county fall harvest festival on a crisp mid-October Saturday when Mara Carter walks up. The air smells like roasted cinnamon almonds, wood smoke, and fermenting hard cider from the booth two down, and the ground under his work boots crunches with half-rotted maple leaves dotted with frost. He hasn’t seen her in eight years, not since his ex’s sister’s wedding, when she was still married to that corporate lawyer from Boston and lived two states away. She’s 42 now, her dark hair braided over one shoulder with a crumpled red maple leaf stuck in the plait, wearing scuffed leather work boots and a faded green flannel that’s too big, sleeves rolled up to show freckled forearms crisscrossed with tiny scratch marks from skittish rescue dogs. She grins when she sees him, and the familiar gap between her two front teeth makes his chest tighten for a second. He’s always thought of her as off-limits, the kid who used to tag along on his and his ex’s camping trips, begging him to teach her how to start a fire with flint and steel.
She leans against the edge of his booth, closer than most people get, and he finds himself leaning back unconsciously, his shoulder bumping the stack of quart syrup jars behind him. Her perfume is pine and vanilla, mixes with the sweet, earthy scent of the grade B dark syrup he’s got out for samples, and he has to stop himself from breathing in too deep. They chat for 20 minutes, she tells him she got divorced six months prior, moved back to town to take a job as a lead vet tech at the small clinic on the edge of town, just closed on the little cottage that butts up against the western edge of his syrup bush. He nods, gives short, gruff answers at first, then finds himself rambling about the new vacuum tap system he installed last spring, the 300-pound black bear that keeps breaking into his storage shed to steal jars of syrup. She laughs so hard at the bear story she snorts, and when she reaches for a sample jar at the same time he does, their hands brush. Her palm is calloused from handling nervous animals and stacking hay bales, and the contact sends a jolt up his arm that he hasn’t felt in well over a decade. He yanks his hand back like he touched a hot stove, his face heating up, and he feels a sharp twist of guilt in his gut. This is his ex-wife’s cousin. He watched her graduate high school. He shouldn’t be noticing how the corners of her eyes crinkle when she laughs, how the flannel pulls tight across her shoulders when she leans forward to listen.
The festival starts wrapping up as the sky darkens, spitting cold, fine rain that seeps through the collar of his frayed fleece. He’s hefting crates of syrup into the bed of his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150 when she offers to help, grabbing the edge of a heavy crate of half-gallon jars. It slips on the water-slicked grass, and he reaches out automatically, grabbing her forearm to yank her out of the way before the glass shatters at her feet. She stumbles into him, chest to chest, and he can feel the heat of her through their layers of flannel, her breath warm against the scar on his left cheek from the 2011 fire that took his crew. She doesn’t pull away, just looks up at him, her dark eyes glinting in the glow of the festival’s orange string lights, and he can’t remember the last time someone looked at him like that, like she actually sees him, not just the quiet syrup guy or the ex-smokejumper with the permanent scowl. He opens his mouth to say he shouldn’t, that this is wrong, but she beats him to it, quiet enough that only he can hear over the wind whipping through the oak trees. “I’m not 16 anymore, Elias. I know what I want.”
He hesitates for half a second, the cold weight of guilt warring with the sharp, bright desire he’s been pushing down all afternoon, then he leans down and kisses her. It’s slow at first, tentative, tastes like the hard cider he was sipping earlier and the caramel apple she was eating when she walked up. She loops her arms around his neck, and he lets his hand rest on her waist, the soft flannel warm under his calloused fingers. The rain picks up, soaking through the back of his shirt, but he doesn’t care.
When they pull apart, he grabs the last of the crates, shoves them in the truck bed, and nods at the passenger door. “Got venison stew on the stove back at the cabin. Fresh buttermilk biscuits, too. You hungry?” She grins, that gap between her teeth showing again, and climbs up into the seat, kicking her mud-caked boots up on the dash. She plucks the maple leaf out of her braid and tucks it behind his ear before he turns the key in the ignition. He pulls out of the parking lot, the wipers slapping steady against the windshield, and when she rests her hand on his forearm, warm and steady, he doesn’t pull away.
