Elias Voss, 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, has held the same 10-foot spot at the Portland Saturday Farmers Market for six years running. He shows up at 6 a.m. sharp, unloads his stack of hand-finished walnut and maple cutting boards, hangs the chipped hand-painted sign his late wife Marnie made him three months before she died, and brews a thermos of black coffee strong enough to strip varnish. He avoids small talk if he can help it, hates when tourists block his stall to take selfies with the peony stand down the row, and has turned down three separate offers from adjacent vendors to split a pepperoni pizza at lunchtime since 2019. His worst flaw, the one he never admits out loud, is that he’s spent seven years actively pushing anyone who might get too close away, convinced that letting someone new in would be a betrayal of the 32 years he had with Marnie.
The first disruption to his routine hits on a humid June morning, when a woman hauling a stack of jam jars and a dented folding table pulls into the empty spot to his left. He recognizes her immediately: Lila Marlow, 47, ex-wife of the former high school vice principal who fired his favorite teacher’s aide in 2012 for taking extra sick days to care for her son with leukemia. He’d avoided Lila back when he worked at the school, partly out of loyalty to the aide, partly because he’d harbored a stupid, useless crush on her since 2007, when she’d showed up to his woodshop after school begging to use his band saw to cut wooden letters for her daughter’s kindergarten classroom. She’d worn a yellow sundress that day, had a streak of blue tempera paint on her cheek, and laughed so hard at his joke about the vice principal’s terrible comb-over that she’d snort-laughed, and he’d thought about that sound for three weeks straight, even though he’d gone home to Marnie that night and never said a word about it.
She recognizes him too, grinning wide enough that the crinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes show, and leans in over the 6-inch gap between their stalls to shake his hand. Her palm is calloused at the fingertips from stirring 10-gallon pots of jam, smells like peach and vanilla, and when their hands brush he feels a jolt run up his arm that he hasn’t felt since he was 16 and kissed a girl for the first time at a drive-in screening of *Jaws*. He mumbles a greeting, turns back to arranging his cutting boards, and tells himself he’s being an idiot. She’s the ex-wife of a man he still resents, 15 years younger than him, way out of his league, and he’s too old for this kind of stupid teenage nonsense.
They spend the first three hours of the market operating in a tense, quiet rhythm. He hands a customer a cutting board wrapped in brown butcher paper, she hands a customer a jar of peach habanero jam, their elbows brush when they both reach for a stack of paper bags sitting on the shared folding table between them, and every time she glances over at him he looks away fast, his face heating up like he’s a kid caught passing notes in class. She teases him about his permanent scowl when a tourist knocks over a small cutting board and doesn’t apologize, offers him a sample of her peach jam on a saltine, and when he takes it, the sweet, tart taste bursts on his tongue and he can’t stop himself from telling her it’s the best jam he’s ever had. She tucks a strand of auburn hair streaked with gray behind her ear, leans in so close he can smell the lavender shampoo in her hair, and says she’s been making it since she left her ex-husband four years ago, that she’d been selling it at small markets around the city and finally worked her way up to this one.
The sky turns inky at 2 p.m., the wind picks up, and the first fat raindrops start falling before anyone has time to grab their tarps. He grabs the stack of cutting boards closest to the edge of his stall, she grabs a crate of jam jars, and when she steps back her boot slips on a patch of wet asphalt, and he drops the cutting boards he’s holding to catch her. She’s pressed against his chest for three full seconds, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her breath warm against his neck, and when he looks down at her she doesn’t move away, just holds his gaze. She says she’s had a crush on him since that day in the woodshop in 2007, that she thought he was the funniest, most handsome man she’d ever met, that she’d been too scared to say anything back then because she was married and he was married. He tells her he’d felt the same way, that he’d been too stubborn and too stupid to let himself admit it, that he’d spent seven years thinking he’d never feel that spark for anyone ever again.
The rain stops as fast as it started, the sun breaks through the clouds, and a faint rainbow arcs over the Willamette River a few blocks away. They pack up their stalls together, he carries her heavy crates of jam to the back of his beat-up Ford pickup, and when he offers to drive her home, she says she’s got a frozen peach pie in her fridge that she’ll bake him if he stays for dinner. He reaches for the last crate of jam jars sitting on the sidewalk, his knuckles brushing hers again, and for the first time in seven years, he doesn’t pull away.
