Roland Voss, 61, retired U.S. Forest Service fire spotter, leaned against the chipped brick wall of the downtown hardware store and sipped his hazelnut stout, already mentally mapping the fastest route back to his cabin off the ridge. He’d only shown up to the town’s annual summer street festival to grab the six pack his sister had left with the beer tent volunteer, refusing her repeated requests to stick around and “meet some people.” Small talk felt like sand in his gears these days, a habit he’d kicked entirely in the eight years since his wife Elaine had died, when he’d realized most conversations only ended with people giving him that pitying tight smile he hated.
The crowd thrummed around him, the sharp smell of smoked brisket from the food truck two stalls down mixing with the sweet, sharp tang of cotton candy and the faint acrid tinge of wildfire smoke drifting south from the blazes up in Washington. He’d just tipped the can back to finish the last sip when a woman stumbled over the curb at his feet, her elbow catching him hard in the ribs, a drop of mango seltzer splattering onto the cuff of his worn gray flannel.
She steadied herself on his forearm for half a second, her palm warm through the thin fabric, before she pulled back, eyes wide. “Shit, I’m so sorry, these boots have zero traction on this gravel.” She was in her late 30s, her dark hair pulled back in a loose braid streaked with a single strand of silver at the temple, wearing faded overalls and a worn Fleetwood Mac tee, the kind that had been washed so soft the print was almost gone. She pulled a crumpled napkin from her overalls pocket and leaned in, dabbing at the seltzer spot on his sleeve, and he caught the scent of coconut sunscreen and lavender hand cream, sharp enough to cut through the festival noise for a second.
He stared down at her, caught off guard, when she laughed, soft, and held up a hand. “Wait, you’re Roland Voss, right? I’m Maren, the new librarian. We’ve been digitizing the old fire lookout logs at the library, I’ve read three years of your entries. You write way better poetry in the margin of those fire watch reports than most of the stuff we have in the poetry section.”
He blinked. No one had mentioned his old lookout logs in years, not since Elaine had teased him about scribbling bad sonnets between smoke sightings. The old guilt pricked at him first, that familiar twist of disgust at the idea of talking to anyone who wasn’t Elaine, of letting anyone else see that part of him he’d locked away after she died. But she was still looking at him, no pity in her eyes, just that easy grin, and she nodded at the half-empty can in his hand. “Elaine was my mom’s cousin, by the way. I met her once at a wedding when I was 12, she told me if I ever moved out here I should track you down and make you take me up to the lookout tower. Said you hoard the best sunsets in the county for yourself.”
“The smoke from the northern fires is supposed to make the sunset bright pink tonight,” he said, before he could talk himself out of it. “I still have the keys to the tower. If you want to go.”
Her grin widened, and she tossed her empty seltzer can into the recycling bin next to the wall, slinging her canvas tote bag over her shoulder. “Hell yes I do. Lead the way.”
He dropped his own half-finished beer into the bin, his knuckles brushing hers when they both reached for the lid at the same time, and she didn’t pull away. He walked her to his beat up 2008 Ford F150 parked two blocks over, holding the passenger door open for her, his hand brushing the small of her back for half a second when she climbed up into the cab. She turned to look at him, her eyes catching the last of the golden hour light, and hummed along to the Merle Haggard song playing low on the truck radio when he turned the key in the ignition. He pulled onto the dirt road leading up to the ridge, dust kicking up behind the tires, and didn’t glance in the rearview mirror.
