Roland Voss, 51, makes custom fly rods for a living out of a cinder block workshop tucked between two apple orchards outside Hendersonville, North Carolina. He’s stubborn to a fault, has carried a grudge against his college ex-wife Maren for 22 years straight, and hasn’t set foot on the Davidson River — the spot they used to fish every weekend — since the day she packed her bags for a London job she never bothered to mention she’d applied for. He only agreed to set up a booth at the town’s annual fall beer festival because his best friend owed him a favor, and the free beer for vendors was too good to pass up.
The air smells like roasted chestnuts, pine, and the sharp, sweet fizz of pumpkin ale drifting from the booths lining Main Street. Roland is polishing a hickory rod blank when a shadow falls across his table, and he looks up to see a woman with deep auburn hair, freckles dusted across her nose, and worn Carhartt overalls rolled at the cuffs leaning against the booth edge. She’s holding a half-empty pint of hazy IPA, and her left thumb has a chip of faded navy nail polish, the same color Maren used to wear in college. His jaw tightens immediately. She introduces herself as Lila, Maren’s 27-year-old daughter from her second marriage, here to pick up the custom rod Roland built for her stepdad Tom, who’s been in hospice for pancreatic cancer for three weeks.
Roland’s first instinct is to tell her to get lost, that he doesn’t do business with anyone connected to Maren. He opens his mouth to say it, but she reaches across the table to grab the extra sample pint he set aside for himself, and her elbow brushes his. The contact is brief, but it sends a jolt up his arm, warm and unexpected, and he freezes mid-sentence. She doesn’t flinch, just holds eye contact, her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners like she knows exactly what he was about to say. She tells him Tom has fished Roland’s rods for 15 years, has a whole shelf of them in his cabin, and that his last wish is to cast one on the Davidson one final time before he can’t hold a rod anymore. She holds up her left wrist, where a thin, silvery scar wraps around the bone from a fly hook accident when she was 16, and Roland’s chest softens — he has the exact same scar on his right wrist, from a stupid mistake he made when he was her age.
He doesn’t say anything for a long minute, just stares at the scar, then reaches under the table to pull out the rod case, wrapped in brown paper with Tom’s name scrawled on the front. When she reaches across to take it, their fingers brush for three full seconds, her skin cold from holding the pint, and neither of them pulls away. She asks if he wants to get a drink after the festival wraps, says her Airbnb fell through that morning and she doesn’t have anywhere to stay the night. Roland hesitates, his mind flashing to Maren’s face the day she left, then nods. He’s got a spare room above the workshop, he says, no frills, but it’s warm.
By the time the festival closes down, the sun has dipped below the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the air is sharp enough to make their noses run. She leans into his side a little when a gust of wind hits them on the walk to his beat-up Ford F-150, her shoulder pressed firm against his bicep, and he can smell her shampoo, pine and clementine, nothing like the rose perfume Maren used to douse herself in. They sit on his workshop porch that night, drinking cheap lager out of cans, and she tells him Maren never blamed him for leaving, that she knew she’d been selfish to take the job without talking to him first, that she still has the first rod he ever built hanging above her fireplace in London. The grudge he’s carried for 22 years feels lighter, like someone cut a hole in the sack he’s been hauling it around in. When she reaches over to run her finger along the raised scar on his left hand, the one he got from a table saw accident 10 years prior, he doesn’t pull away.
He drives her to Tom’s cabin on the Davidson River the next morning. The leaves are blazing red and gold along the riverbank, and for the first time in two decades, he doesn’t feel the urge to look away from the water. She kisses him on the cheek before she climbs out of the truck, her lips warm against his cold skin, and says she’ll be back in a month to bring him a photo of Tom with the first fish he catches on the new rod. He watches her walk up the cabin steps, sees Maren standing on the porch holding a mug of coffee, and lifts a hand in greeting. He waits until Lila is inside and the door clicks shut behind her, then pulls out his phone to type a text asking her if she wants to learn to tie dry flies when she comes back.
