Ronan O’Malley, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service fire spotter, leans against a weathered hay bale at the small Oregon mountain town’s annual fall harvest festival, spiced cider sweating through the paper cup in his grip. He’d only showed up because his neighbor begged him to drop off a batch of his homemade smoked almonds for the bake sale, and he’d planned to leave 20 minutes prior, but the crowd by the exit was too thick, too full of people who’d ask how he was doing like they actually cared instead of just fishing for something to gossip about over Sunday brunch. The bluegrass band on the makeshift stage warbles a cover of a Johnny Cash song he hasn’t heard since his late wife Elara dragged him to a concert in Reno for their 20th anniversary. The air smells like fried dough, burnt caramel, and pine, sharp enough to make his nose run a little. His beat-up forest service flannel is thin enough that the October wind nips at his shoulders.
A shoulder bumps his, light, intentional. He turns, and it takes him three full seconds to place her. Maeve. Elara’s much younger half-sister, the one who left town the day after she graduated high school, who only ever came back for funerals, who the town has been whispering about for three weeks straight ever since she moved back, freshly divorced, the gossip mill churning that she left her tech CEO husband for a woman she met at a writing retreat in Vermont. She’s 42 now, her dark hair streaked with silver at the temples, wearing a thick cream cable knit sweater and scuffed work boots, a smear of blue paint on her jaw from fixing up the old downtown bookstore she just bought. She grins, and it’s the same lopsided grin she had when she was 17 and snuck a six pack of his beer out of his garage before a camping trip. “You still wear that same ugly flannel,” she says, leaning in to hug him before he can answer. Her hair smells like vanilla and pine resin, her arm presses tight to his when she pulls back, and their knuckles brush when she plucks the cider cup out of his hand without asking, takes a long sip.
He flinches at first, half out of surprise, half out of that old, stupid guilt that’s lived in his chest since Elara died seven years prior. She’s family, for Christ’s sake, he tells himself. Everyone’s watching. The couple selling apple butter ten feet away is already glancing over, whispering. He should step back, make an excuse, leave. But she’s still holding his gaze, her brown eyes warm, no pity in them, no rehearsed “I’m sorry for your loss” line he’s heard a thousand times from strangers and acquaintances alike. “I saw the skis you fixed for the kid down the street,” she says, nodding at the “O’Malley’s Ski Repair” sticker on the back of his work truck parked at the edge of the field. He fixes vintage cross-country skis out of his garage for extra cash, something to keep his calloused hands busy when he’s not hiking the old fire trails. “I’ve got a pair of vintage 90s cross country skis in my garage that haven’t been tuned in 15 years. You gonna charge me family rate?” She teases him, nudging his boot with hers, and he laughs, a real laugh, the kind he hasn’t let out in months.
They step out of the crowd when a group of teens runs past, swinging caramel apples on sticks, and her shoulder presses to his again, warm through the thin flannel. She tells him about the bookstore, how she’s going to turn the back room into a poetry open mic, how she still has the stack of fire tower postcards he sent her when she was living in New York, working as a barista, writing bad poetry in her free time. He didn’t think she’d kept those. He’d sent them on a whim, every few months, scribbled a dumb joke on the back about how the view from the tower was better than any skyline she could get in the city. He feels that tightness in his chest loosen, just a little, like a knot he didn’t know was there finally unraveling.
The band stops playing, the crowd cheers, and she tilts her head at the truck. “Wanna get out of here?” she says, and he hesitates for half a second, thinking about the gossip, about Elara, about how stupid it is to be this nervous at 58 years old. But then she reaches up, brushes a fleck of cinnamon off his lip with her thumb, and her skin is soft, warm, and he doesn’t argue. They climb into the cab of his old Ford, the seats worn smooth from 20 years of use, and before he can turn the key, she leans across the bench seat, kisses him slow, her hand resting on the side of his face. The windows fog up fast, the faint sound of the festival’s string music drifting through the closed doors, and he doesn’t care who’s walking past, who sees, who talks. That guilt that’s been hanging over him for seven years doesn’t feel like a weight anymore, it just feels like something he can finally set down.
When they pull apart, she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, grinning that same lopsided grin. “I’ve got a bottle of rye whiskey back at the apartment above the bookstore,” she says. “And those skis. You gonna help me tune them tomorrow?” He nods, turns the key in the ignition, the truck rumbling to life. He pulls out onto the dirt road leading back into town, the glow of the festival’s string lights shrinking smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. His hand rests on the bench seat between them, and she laces her fingers through his, her palm calloused from moving boxes of books, warm against his.
