Roland Voss, 62, spent 38 years hanging off the side of Chicago skyscrapers as a high-rise window washer before retiring to a 2-bedroom cottage on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore after his wife died of breast cancer in 2016. His only steady income now comes from restoring vintage fishing lures he finds at garage sales, a hobby he’d picked up as a kid growing up in Green Bay, and he avoids most town events like they’re contagious—too much small talk, too many questions about why he never brings a date, too many people who want to pry into the hole he’s carefully walled off around his personal life. The only reason he’s at the volunteer fire department’s summer beer garden fundraiser at all is because his 82-year-old neighbor, Marnie, had showed up on his porch with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and threatened to stop feeding his cat when he went out fishing if he didn’t make an appearance.
He’s leaning against a splintered wooden post at the far edge of the canvas tent, nursing a hazy IPA he doesn’t even like, when he spots her. Clara Marlow, 58, owns the town’s only used bookstore, widow of the former fire chief who’d suffered a heart attack on a call four years prior. The whole town treats her like she’s made of blown glass, no one’s dared ask her out in three years, like dating after losing a spouse is some unforgivable sin. She’s wiping down a folding table with a ragged dish towel, laughing at a story the 16-year-old volunteer firefighter next to her is telling, and the late August sun catches the streak of silver running through her dark brown hair, makes her freckles stand out across the bridge of her nose. Roland’s chest tightens, and he tells himself to look away, that he’s got no business staring, that he’s still too broken from losing Ellen to even think about talking to another woman.
He’s just about to sneak out through the back of the tent when he hears a yelp. Clara’s carrying a tray stacked high with pulled pork sliders, tripped over the leg of a rolling cooler someone left in the walkway, and she’s tipping forward, the whole tray about to go flying. Roland moves faster than he has in years, steps in to catch her elbow with one calloused hand, steadies the edge of the tray with the other before any of the sliders can hit the dirt. Their fingers brush when she grabs the tray to right it, and he feels the hard callus on the pad of her left thumb, the same kind he’s seen on people who turn thousands of book pages a year, and she feels the thick, raised scar wrapping around his right wrist, the one he got when a support cable snapped on the 72nd floor of the John Hancock Center back in 2001. They hold eye contact for three full beats, longer than is strictly polite, and her cheeks pinken just a little, the color of the wild roses that grow along his driveway.
“Sorry about that,” she says, shifting the tray to one hip, and her voice is lower than he expected, rough around the edges like she’s spent years laughing too loud in smoky rooms. “Some genius left that cooler right where everyone’s walking.”
“Least you didn’t dump barbecue sauce all over the new chief’s uniform,” Roland says, nodding at the guy in the fire coat standing by the grill, and she snorts, a loud, unselfconscious sound that makes the corner of his mouth twitch up, something he hasn’t done without thinking in months.
They end up leaning against that same post for the next 45 minutes, talking over the low rumble of the country cover band playing in the corner, the smell of charcoal and burnt hot dogs drifting through the tent. She tells him she’s been trying to get someone to take her out fishing for six months, but every guy in town acts like she’d faint if she had to bait a hook, like the only things she cares about are 19th century poetry and first edition children’s books. He tells her he’s got a 17-foot Boston Whaler he takes out on the lake at 5 a.m. most weekends, that he usually goes alone, that the best bite happens before the sun even crests the horizon. He doesn’t mention that he’s been lonely on those trips, that he’s started talking to his cat when he gets home because there’s no one else to tell about the 30-inch salmon he caught last month.
The air cools as the sun goes down, and she shivers a little, pulls her flannel shirt tighter around her shoulders. He’s about to offer her his jacket when she leans in, close enough he can smell the vanilla lip balm she’s wearing, the faint scent of old paper and lavender that sticks to her clothes. “I open the store at 5:30 every morning,” she says, her voice low enough only he can hear, ignoring the sideways glances the group of retired firefighters at the next table are throwing their way. “If you show up at my back door at 5, I’ll bring the coffee—black, no sugar, just how you guys like it—and you bring the lures. I don’t care what the gossips around here say. I’m tired of sitting inside on nice weekends.”
Roland hesitates for half a second, the familiar guilt twisting in his gut, the voice in his head that says he’s betraying Ellen by even considering this. But then he looks at Clara, at the crinkle around her eyes when she smiles, at the callus on her thumb he’d felt earlier, and the voice quiets down. He nods, says he’ll be there, and lifts a hand to brush a stray oak leaf off her shoulder, his fingers grazing the soft skin of her neck for just a second. She doesn’t flinch, just smiles wider.
He leaves a few minutes later, doesn’t stick around for the raffle drawing Marnie had been nagging him to enter. He walks to his beat-up Ford F-150, the gravel crunching under his work boots, and pulls the crumpled pack of new circle hooks he’d stuffed in his Carhartt pocket that morning out to check they’re still there, sharp and ready to use.
