Elroy Voss, 62, spent 30 years manning fire towers in the Cascade Range before his wife left and he relocated to a one-room cabin outside Duluth, Minnesota. His worst flaw, by his own unspoken admission, was that he’d spent 12 years treating casual human connection like a wildfire he had to smother before it spread. He’d missed his old hunting buddy Jesse’s funeral the previous spring because he’d taken a solo three-week canoe trip through the Boundary Waters and left his cell phone in a lockbox at the outfitters, too stubborn to let anyone reach him even for an emergency.
That October night, he was perched on a scuffed vinyl stool at the VFW bar, fresh off winning a 10-pound ribeye at the weekly meat raffle, lingering for one last neat bourbon before he drove the 20 miles back to his cabin. The air smelled like stale beer, fried onion rings, and pine smoke curling out of the brick fireplace by the pool tables, the jukebox spitting out a slow Merle Haggard track so low it was almost background noise. Most of the regulars had already filtered out, only the old guys playing cribbage in the corner left besides him.
Marnie, Jesse’s 48-year-old daughter who’d moved back to town two months prior after her own divorce, was wiping down the bartop with a ragged cloth, and when she leaned over to grab his empty bourbon glass, her forearm brushed his. He noticed her hands had the same rough calluses as his, lined with tiny nicks from the carpentry side work she did fixing up old cabins around the county. She held eye contact a beat longer than a bartender usually would with a patron, a half-smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, and said she still remembered him bringing her root beer floats when she was 8, back when he and Jesse would haul her along on deer hunting trips so she could collect acorns and chase frogs in the woods.
Elroy tensed up immediately, his jaw tightening. He’d only ever seen Marnie as Jesse’s loud, messy kid, the one who’d fallen off his ATV when she was 10 and gotten a thin, pale scar above her left eyebrow that he’d felt guilty about for months. The idea that he was even noticing how the low light gilded the silver streak in her dark hair felt like a betrayal of Jesse, like he was crossing a line he’d never allowed himself to even look at before. He mumbled a noncommittal reply, sipped the fresh bourbon she’d poured him, and tried to look anywhere but at her face.
She didn’t pull away. She leaned her hip against the bar across from him, their knees bumping under the counter, and he didn’t move his leg back. She told him she was fixing up Jesse’s old cabin on the other side of the lake, that the wood stove was busted and she couldn’t figure out how to get it to hold a flame, that she’d heard he was the best guy around for fixing old cast iron anything. She laughed when he told her about the time he’d had a skunk sneak into his fire tower and he’d had to sleep in his truck for three days until the smell faded, and her hand landed on his bicep, warm and firm, and she didn’t yank it away like she’d touched something hot.
The cribbage players left a few minutes later, the door slamming shut behind them and sending a gust of cold October air swirling through the bar. The jukebox cut out mid-track, leaving only the crackle of the fire and the distant hum of the beer cooler. Marnie wiped the last of the counters, tossed the rag under the bar, and said she was closing up. She tilted her head toward the door, her eyes glinting, and asked if he wanted to come back to her place. She’d throw that ribeye he won on the grill, if he’d help her mess with the wood stove first.
Elroy’s brain screamed at him to say no. That everyone in town would talk. That Jesse would roll in his grave if he knew Elroy was even considering it. That he was too old, too gruff, too set in his ways to be messing around with a woman he’d watched grow up. But then he looked at her, her cheeks pink from the heat of the bar, that faint scar above her eyebrow that he’d caused, and he realized she wasn’t a kid anymore. She was a grown woman who knew exactly what she was asking for, who’d seen his worst flaws and didn’t seem to care about them.
He nodded, grabbed the paper-wrapped ribeye off the bar, and followed her out to her beat-up Ford pickup. The cold air bit at his cheeks, and he could smell the pine shampoo in her hair as she walked ahead of him, her boots crunching on the fallen maple leaves scattered across the parking lot. She opened the passenger door for him, and their fingers brushed when he handed her the steak to toss in the back seat, the contact sending a jolt up his arm he hadn’t felt in over a decade.
She pulled out of the parking lot, turning down the dirt road that led to the lake, the truck’s heater blowing warm air over his hands. When she got to her driveway, she turned off the engine, sat for a second, and looked over at him, saying she’d been working up the nerve to ask him out since she’d seen him at the grocery store three weeks prior, too scared he’d laugh and tell her she was still just Jesse’s kid. Elroy reached across the center console, his calloused thumb brushing that thin scar above her eyebrow, and for the first time in 12 years, he didn’t feel the urge to run from the warmth spreading through his chest. She leaned in, her lips tasting like cherry cola and bourbon, soft against his.
