Elroy Voss, 62, wore the same faded Steelers cap he’d owned since 2005 to the Erie summer street fair, calloused hands stuffed in the pockets of his oil-stained work jeans. He’d avoided the fair for two years straight out of spite for the school board that’d cut his JV football program 8 years prior, but the smoked sausage stand run by the local fire department was too good to pass up. The air hummed with the creak of the ferris wheel, the high shriek of kids on the tilt-a-whirl, sharp with the scent of grilled onions and cotton candy.
A warm, soft weight bumped his back as he shifted forward in line, and the faint smell of lavender and lemon furniture polish hit his nose before he turned. He recognized her immediately: Maren Hale, 58, the new head librarian who’d stood up at the town hall meeting the week prior and argued the football program’s leftover budget would be better spent on after-school literacy tutoring for the west side’s low-income kids. He’d almost stormed out when she’d said it, jaw tight enough to crack a tooth. She held up a stack of crumpled summer reading flyers in apology, her left wrist dotted with a tiny, faded tattoo of a brook trout, and he froze. He’d seen that tattoo before, he realized, on a woman who’d stopped into his bait and tackle shop every other weekend to buy minnows for her visiting 10-year-old nephew. He’d never bothered to look at her face before, too wrapped up in his own bad mood to pay attention.
She didn’t back down when he narrowed his eyes, just smirked, the corner of her mouth tugging up like she knew exactly what he was thinking. “I get it,” she said, shifting the flyers to her other arm so she could hold out a hand to shake. Her palm was soft, but her grip was firm, calloused at the fingertips from holding fishing rods, he realized. “My dad was a lineman coach outside Cleveland for 30 years. I know how much that program meant to you.” He grunted, not willing to give her the satisfaction of agreeing, but he didn’t pull his hand away right away.
They ended up next to each other at the picnic table under the gnarled oak at the edge of the fairgrounds, both holding foil-wrapped sausage sandwiches dripping with yellow mustard and sauerkraut. Her elbow brushed his bicep when she reached for a napkin, and he felt the heat of the contact linger through the thin cotton of his flannel shirt. She told him she’d moved to Erie 8 months prior, after her husband of 28 years died of a sudden heart attack, that she’d picked the town specifically for the walleye fishing and the quiet. He told her he’d lived in the same house 10 minutes from the lake his whole adult life, that his ex-wife had moved to Florida 8 years prior and never looked back. He didn’t mention the grudge he’d been nursing against the library board until she laughed and said she’d seen him slip $20 into the donation jar for the park’s free little library kiosk last month, even though he’d pretended he was just dropping off a stack of old fishing magazines.
His face burned, and he was about to make a snarky comment about Browns fans (he’d seen the faded Browns sticker on the back of her pickup truck in the shop parking lot once) when her knee brushed his under the table. She didn’t move it. He didn’t either. The sun was dipping low over the lake now, painting the sky streaky pink and tangerine, and the breeze off the water carried the faint sound of a cover band playing old Tom Petty songs from the main stage. She swatted a mosquito off his jaw, her fingers brushing his stubble for half a second, and he felt his chest go tight, the same flutter he’d only felt once before, when he’d asked his first high school girlfriend to homecoming.
She folded up the last of her flyers and slipped them into her tote bag as she stood, brushing crumbs off her khaki shorts. “I’m heading out to the shallow flats north of the inlet next Saturday at 5 a.m.,” she said, leaning against the edge of the table so she was close enough that he could smell that lavender scent again. “No one else is around that early. You wanna come? I got an extra rod. You can bring the coffee, I take it with extra cream.”
He nodded before he could think better of it, suddenly 16 again, tripping over his own feet to say yes. She handed him a crumpled flyer for the library’s upcoming senior fishing story hour, told him he should come tell the kids about the 32-inch walleye he’d caught last spring, the one he had mounted above the checkout counter at his shop. He tucked the flyer into the breast pocket of his flannel, watched her walk to her beat-up brown pickup, wave once before she pulled out onto the road.
He reached into his jeans pocket for his phone, already scrolling to set a 4:30 a.m. alarm for Saturday, the faint scent of lavender still clinging to the cuff of his shirt.
