Ronan O’Malley, 62, retired forest fire spotter, leaned against the sun-warmed brick wall of the town’s hardware store and sipped his amber ale, already mentally calculating how fast he could sneak out of the annual Silverton Harvest Fair without his niece chewing him out. He’d spent an hour manning her kettle corn stand earlier, his forearms dusted with sugar and salt, and had promised he’d stick around long enough to grab dinner with her later, but the crowd of yelling kids and strolling couples was grating on the last nerve he had left. The air smelled like fried dough and cut apple wood, the bluegrass band two blocks over sawing at a fiddle loud enough that he could feel the thrum of the bass in his work boots, and every third person who passed stopped to ask him how his knee was holding up after he’d slipped off a ladder fixing his gutters last month. He hated small town nosiness, even when it was well-meaning.
He shifted to avoid a group of teens sprinting past with dripping cotton candy sticks, and his shoulder slammed into something soft. A sharp yelp followed, and he looked down to see a woman with streaks of silver in her chestnut braid fumbling a glass jar of spiced pear jam, the lid half off. He caught it before it could shatter on the asphalt, his calloused fingers brushing hers for half a second, and his throat went dry when he met her eyes. It was Clara Bennett, the new town librarian he’d been avoiding for three months, ever since he’d walked into the library to grab a western novel and had frozen mid-step when he saw her laugh, the sound bright and warm, exactly like his late wife Ellen’s used to be when she’d catch him sneaking cookies before dinner.
He passed her the jar, his ears burning. “Sorry about that. Wasn’t watching where I was going.”
“Lucky for me you were,” she said, wiping a smudge of jam off her wrist with the hem of her flannel shirt, and she held his gaze a beat longer than polite, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a teasing grin. “Figured the human bumper car routine was just part of the fair experience. I won that jar at the cake walk ten minutes ago, would’ve cried if it bit the dust.”
She smelled like lavender laundry soap and cinnamon, and she was standing close enough that he could see the little gold flecks in her hazel eyes, the faint ink stain on her thumb from marking up library holds. He’d assumed she was married for weeks, after he saw a 10-year-old kid with a mohawk call her mom at the general store, but he’d heard last week the kid was her foster son, obsessed with dinosaur encyclopedias, and she’d been widowed just as long as he had.
The guilt hit him first, sharp and familiar, like he was doing something wrong just standing there talking to her. He’d spent seven years deliberately shutting out any possibility of connection, convinced that even thinking about another woman was a betrayal of Ellen, who he’d been married to for 34 years before she got sick. But he couldn’t make himself step away.
She nodded at the faded Forest Service patch on his flannel shirt, the logo he still sewed on all his outerwear. “I was actually going to track you down soon. I’m putting together a local history display at the library about the old fire towers around the valley. Everyone says you ran the one on Mount Hebo for 12 years. I’ve been trying to get up there for months, but the trail’s overgrown, and I don’t trust myself not to trip and break an ankle on those old wooden stairs.”
He hesitated, his instinct to say no already on the tip of his tongue, but she raised an eyebrow, like she knew he was about to make an excuse. “Wait, don’t tell me you’re scared those stairs are creakier than you remember. All that time climbing ladders for work, and you’re gonna let a rickety fire tower beat you?”
He snorted, despite himself. “Fine. I’ll take you up tomorrow, if you’re free. But you owe me a slice of that pear jam on toast if we don’t die on the climb.”
She laughed, and the sound made his chest feel light, like it hadn’t in years. “Deal. I’ll even bring the coffee. Black, right? I’ve seen you order it at the diner every Saturday morning.”
He drove her out to the tower the next morning, his old pickup truck bumping over the rutted dirt road, her foster son’s dinosaur action figure rolling around on the dashboard between them. The trail was indeed overgrown, blackberry bushes snagging at their jeans, and when they got to the tower, the stairs did creak, loud enough that he could hear the wood groan under every step. He held out his hand without thinking, and she laced her fingers through his, her palm soft but strong, and they climbed the three flights in silence, no need for small talk.
The view from the top took his breath away, even though he’d seen it a hundred times before. The valley stretched out below them, oak and maple trees blazing red and orange, the Columbia River glinting silver in the late morning sun, the distant peaks of the Cascades dusted with the first light snow of the season. She leaned against the rail next to him, their shoulders pressed tight together, no awkward fidgeting, no need to move away.
“I know it’s weird,” she said quietly, after a minute, “talking to someone who gets it. Most people either look at you like you’re gonna break if they mention the person you lost, or they tell you you should be over it by now.”
He nodded, his throat tight. He’d heard both, more times than he could count. “I thought I’d never want to talk to anyone else, honestly. Felt like if I did, I was cheating on Ellen.”
She turned to look at him, her shoulder still pressed to his, and she reached over, brushed a pine needle off the collar of his shirt. “My husband used to tell me if I spent the rest of my life lonely after he was gone, he’d come back to haunt me. I think Ellen would probably yell at you for wasting seven years of perfectly good time sitting around your house by yourself.”
He laughed, a rough, shaky sound, and he didn’t pull away when she rested her hand on his arm. There was a smudge of pear jam on her wrist, leftover from the toast she’d brought with them, and he wiped it off with his thumb, his skin brushing hers, the contact sending a jolt up his arm that he hadn’t felt in decades.
They stayed up there for two hours, him telling her stories about the fires he’d spotted, the time a bald eagle built a nest on the edge of the tower landing and refused to leave for three months, her telling him about the kid she was fostering, how he’d read every dinosaur book in the library twice and kept leaving drawn pictures of T-Rexes on her desk. On the drive back, he stopped at the diner on the edge of town, ordered them both apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and when she took a bite and got a crumb on her lower lip, he reached over and wiped it off with his knuckle, slow, like he was making sure he wasn’t dreaming.
She smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners, and didn’t look away. The waitress dropped off the check, winked at him when she walked back to the counter, and he slid it into his pocket before she could reach for it. He asked her if she wanted to come over next weekend, help him can the pears he’d picked off the tree in his backyard the week before. She said yes, no hesitation, and when he dropped her off at her house, she squeezed his hand before she got out of the truck. He watched her walk up the porch steps, wave at him through the screen door, and when he pulled away, he didn’t feel guilty, not even a little bit. He turned up the old Johnny Cash CD he had in the player, rolled down the window, and let the cool fall air blow in his face.
