Elias Voss, 57, custom fly rod builder, has lived outside Brevard, North Carolina for 22 years, and hasn’t set foot at the county fire department’s annual chili cookoff since his wife Lila died six years prior. His fishing buddy Ray practically shoves him through the pavilion gate at 7 p.m., teases him for turning into a hermit who only talks to wild trout and his 30-year-old belt sander. The air reeks of smoked pork, generic light beer, and the overly sweet artificial cherry punch the fire department’s junior volunteers are handing out in flimsy plastic cups. Elias grabs a paper plate of the least spicy chili he can find, leans against the cinder block wall by the dessert table, and sets a mental timer for 12 minutes before he can make a half-believable excuse and bolt back to his workshop.
He’s halfway through the chili, picking out the chunks of green pepper he’s hated since he was a kid, when a hand reaches past his shoulder for the last slice of peach cobbler on the tray. Their knuckles brush. Her skin is cool, dotted with a faint blue ink stain at the first joint, and she yanks her hand back half a second before he does, a soft, huffing laugh falling out of her. “Sorry,” she says, wiping her hand on the thigh of her worn denim overalls, “I’ve been staring at that thing for 20 minutes, figured no one else would go for the one with the extra crumble topping.” She’s the new part-time librarian, he remembers, moved to town three months prior, lives in the little rental cabin off the Davidson River that used to belong to the old forest ranger. No one’s introduced them, mostly because Elias avoids the library like it’s full of people who want to ask him how he’s holding up, the patronizing, pitying question everyone in town has been asking since Lila’s funeral.
He nods, pushes the plate with the cobbler toward her. “You take it. I don’t like peaches enough to fight for them.” She grins, picks up the slice, and leans against the wall two feet away from him, close enough that he can smell lavender laundry detergent and the faint cinnamon of the churro she must have eaten earlier, not so close that it feels intrusive. Most people in town give him a three-foot buffer, like his grief is a contagious cold they don’t want to catch. She doesn’t. She asks him what he does for work, holds his gaze when he says he builds custom fly rods, doesn’t nod along like she knows what a ferrule is or why a cured bamboo rod is worth three times a mass-produced graphite one, just asks if it’s as tedious as it sounds. He finds himself talking for 15 minutes, telling her about the 12-foot salmon rod he’s building for a client in Alaska, the way the bamboo smells like honey when he’s planing it down, the way he carves tiny trout into the handles of rods he makes for local kids. He hasn’t talked to a stranger that long in six years. His chest feels tight, half from the sharp, familiar guilt of enjoying a conversation that doesn’t revolve around Lila’s memory, half from the weird, warm buzz he hasn’t felt since he first asked Lila out at a 1989 college fraternity cookout.
She tells him she’s been trying to teach herself to fish the trout stream behind her cabin, has a $20 Walmart rod that snapped in half last weekend when she hooked a 12-inch rainbow. He’s already offering to give her the half-finished beginner bamboo rod he has sitting on his workbench before he can think better of it. “No charge,” he says, before she can protest, “I built it for a neighbor’s kid who decided he’d rather play soccer, it’s just collecting dust.” She tilts her head, the string lights strung above the pavilion gilding the edges of her wavy brown hair, and says she’ll pay him in a sour cherry pie, the kind her grandma taught her to make, no canned filling, crust from scratch with lard. Her shoulder brushes his bicep when she leans in to hand him a napkin he didn’t realize he dropped, and he doesn’t flinch. He hasn’t let anyone that close on purpose since the last time Lila hugged him, two days before her car crash.
They exchange numbers on the back of a crumpled chili cookoff entry slip, and he leaves 10 minutes later, his chest lighter than it’s been in years. He stops at the grocery store on his way home to pick up a jar of sour cherry jam, just to test if her pie will be as good as she says, and when he gets back to his workshop, he pulls the beginner rod off the shelf, sands the smooth maple handle for 20 minutes, and ties a hand-tied rainbow trout fly to the end of the pre-spooled line with a note scrawled on scrap balsa wood that says “6 a.m. Saturday, the pull-off by the ranger station, if you’re not a slow riser.”
