Roland Voss leans his shoulder against the rough cedar slat of the beer garden fence, calloused thumb rubbing the chipped rim of his IPA. He’s 58, spent 32 years perched in fire lookouts across the Willamette National Forest, and the one habit he never shook is scanning every crowd for friction, for trouble, for the thing that’s going to blow up the quiet he’s curated since Ellen died seven years back. Today’s trouble is 54-year-old Marnie Hale, Ellen’s baby sister, the woman he’s refused to speak to for 22 years because he’d thought she skipped their wedding to get drunk at a coastal rave with her college friends. He only found out last week, from Ellen’s old roommate, that Marnie had been t-boned by a drunk driver 12 miles from the venue, spent three days in the ER with a fractured pelvis and a concussion, and lied about the rave so no one would ruin their first day of marriage feeling guilty.
“Didn’t think you’d show up to this thing,” she yells over the guitar riff, leaning in so her shoulder brushes his bicep, the heat of her skin seeping through the thin cotton of his work flannel. She runs an equine therapy program for disabled vets out of a small farm 20 minutes outside town, he remembers, sees her service animal stickers on the back of her beat-up Ford F-150 at the grocery store every few weeks. He’d always look away fast, jaw tight, stupid pride coiled hot in his chest. Now that pride feels like ash in his throat.
He nods, takes a sip of beer that tastes more bitter than it did 30 seconds prior. “Got roped into bringing the silent auction prize. Old compass I used up in the lookout. Figured someone would get more use out of it than it’s gotten sitting on my kitchen shelf the last five years.” He gestures to the folding table 10 feet away, where the dented brass compass sits under a plastic case, and her eyes light up. She steps closer, her scuffed work boot almost touching his, and when she tilts her head up to talk, her breath smells like lemon and mint, and he has to fight the stupid urge to lean in.
“I’ve always loved that thing. Ellen used to tell me you’d bring her up to the lookout on your days off, stargaze on the catwalk.” Her voice goes soft, just loud enough for him to hear over the crowd, and he flinches like he’s been burned. He’d spent so many years yelling at Ellen for defending Marnie, calling her selfish, calling her flaky, and now he realizes every one of those fights was for nothing. The disgust he feels for himself is sharp, tangled up with a stupid, thrumming want he hasn’t felt since Ellen got sick, the kind that makes his palms sweat, makes his ears go hot.
“I owe you an apology,” he says, the words coming out rougher than he means them to. He tells her what he found out, about the crash, about the lie she told to spare their feelings, and her smile fades, her thumb rubbing the rim of her seltzer can so hard her knuckle goes white. She says she never told anyone, never wanted to be the thing that caused tension between him and Ellen, even when he’d snub her at family dinners, even when he’d leave the room the second she walked in. She says she’d had a crush on him since she was 19, when he’d driven up to her college to help her fix her busted pickup after Ellen asked, and she’d never said a word out of respect for her sister, out of respect for the life they built.
The band cuts out for a set break, the hum of the crowd swelling around them, and she’s so close he can count the gold flecks in her eyes, can feel the heat rolling off her skin. He’s spent seven years telling himself he’d never want anyone else, spent 22 years hating the woman standing in front of him, and all of that feels like it’s melting away, slow and warm, under her gaze. She brushes a fleck of BBQ sauce off his chin with her knuckle, the contact light, electric, and he doesn’t pull away.
He asks her if she wants to drive up to the old lookout, the one he still has a key to, watch the sunset paint the valley pink and orange. She grins, the same lopsided grin Ellen used to have when she was about to do something a little reckless, and slips her hand into his, her palm soft but calloused at the fingers from mucking out stalls, from adjusting bridles. They walk past the crowd, no one glances twice, the cool evening wind carrying the smell of wild clover and pine off the hills, and she squeezes his hand once, tight, as they cross the parking lot to his truck.
