Elroy Voss is 62, spent 28 years leading wildland fire crews across the Northern Rockies before he hung up his hard hat to run a small firewood delivery outfit outside Missoula, Montana. His biggest flaw, one he’s carried like a lead vest since his wife Lois passed from breast cancer seven years prior, is that he’s convinced any hint of joy unrelated to splitting oak or tending his beehives is a betrayal of the 32 years they spent together. He avoids the town’s annual fall harvest festival like the plague most years, but he’d just dropped a cord of seasoned fir off for an elderly widow three blocks over, and the scent of grilled brats and cold IPA pulled him off the sidewalk before he could talk himself out of it.
Sawdust was crusted in the cuff of his red plaid flannel, his work boots still caked with mud from the wood lot, and he kept his head down as he squeezed through the crowd of families in Halloween costumes and college kids home for the long weekend. He ordered a lager from the kid behind the beer tent counter, turned to find an empty spot at the picnic tables, and locked eyes with Maren Hale. He’d spoken to her exactly twice before: once when her golden retriever got loose and tore through his beehive yard last spring, and once when he’d cleared a 60-foot ponderosa pine that had fallen across her driveway during a December windstorm. She was 41, married to the town’s most obnoxious hunting guide, a guy who’d made no secret of cheating on her during a week-long elk trip the prior month, a piece of gossip everyone in town had heard but no one had dared say to her face.
She slid over on the splintered bench to make room for him, her knee brushing the side of his work pant when he sat, and he could smell vanilla lotion, powdered sugar from the apple cider donuts stacked on the table in front of her, and the faint tart scent of the plum jam she’d sold at the bake sale earlier that day. Her apron was still tied around her waist, a smudge of flour on the inside of her left wrist, and she nodded at the sawdust on his sleeve, grinning. “Look like you lost a fight with a table saw,” she said, and he laughed, a rough, rusty sound he hadn’t heard come out of his own mouth in months.
He tensed up a second later, ashamed. He didn’t talk to married women, didn’t let himself notice the way the sun hit the gold streaks in her brown hair, didn’t let himself feel the spark when her fingers brushed his as she reached for his beer bottle to read the label on the side. Disgust curdled in his gut first—for disrespecting Lois, for even entertaining the thought that a woman 21 years his junior would have any interest in talking to him, for drawing the eyes of the guys at the next table who he knew were friends with her husband. But the desire was louder, warm and steady in his chest, the first time he’d felt anything besides numb grief and exhaustion in years.
She didn’t pull her hand away right away, held his gaze steady, no shyness in it. “I’m filing for divorce next week,” she said, quiet enough only he could hear, not even glancing over at the other end of the tent where her husband was yelling about a 12-point buck he’d shot last fall. “Already put a down payment on that little rental cabin off the access road to your wood lot. Was gonna bring you another jar of jam to say thanks for the driveway thing, didn’t know if you’d want to take it.”
The noise of the festival faded for a second, kids’ screams on the hayride, country music over the speakers, crowd chatter all melting into a low hum. He didn’t move away when she leaned in closer, their shoulders pressed tight, heat from her arm seeping through his thin flannel. He thought of Lois, how she’d always called him too stubborn for his own good, how she’d made him promise he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life alone after she was gone.
He told her he had a pickup with a lift gate, no plans next Saturday, could help her move the heavy furniture she didn’t want to pay movers to haul. Her grin widened, she grabbed a napkin from the stack next to the donuts, scribbled her cell number on it in blue ballpoint, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his flannel, her fingertips brushing the scar on his chest he’d gotten from a falling tree branch on a 1998 fire crew job.
She stood up, grabbed a donut off the plate, winked at him, and walked off toward the bake sale table to help a little kid pick out a sugar cookie. Elroy closed his hand over the napkin in his pocket, the paper crinkling under his calloused fingers, and took a long, cold sip of his lager.
