Elroy Voss is 62, retired forest fire spotter, 32 years perched in 100-foot lookout towers across northern Idaho, and he hasn’t so much as asked a woman out for coffee since his wife died of breast cancer eight years back. His biggest flaw is he’s convinced everyone in his new small Montana town is just waiting for a reason to gossip about him, so he sticks to his garage fixing up his 1972 Ford F-150, volunteers at the food bank twice a week, and only shows up to community events when his 9-year-old granddaughter begs him. The summer street fair is non-negotiable; she’d made him promise three weeks prior to win her a goldfish at the ring toss.
He’s waiting in line for a smoked brisket sandwich, sweat beading at the edge of his frayed US Forest Service ball cap, when a kid darting past with a melting blue raspberry snow cone makes him step back hard. His shoulder slams into someone behind him, he hears a small yelp, and he spins around fast, already apologizing. The woman he bumped into is holding a dented glass jar of dill pickles, the lid half slipping off, and he catches it one-handed before it can hit the asphalt. His knuckles brush her wrist, cool from holding the cold jar, and he pulls his hand back like he’s touched a hot stove the second the jar is steady.
He recognizes her immediately. Mara Hale, his granddaughter’s 48-year-old fourth grade teacher, the one who’d laughed so hard at his story about a golden eagle landing on his lookout tower railing during last month’s parent-teacher conference that she’d snort-laughed into her travel mug. He’d replayed that snort for three days afterward, then called himself an idiot every time it popped into his head. Too young, too put-together, too busy dealing with 25 nine-year-olds to waste time on a grumpy old guy with a scar slashing across his left cheek from a falling pine branch and a habit of forgetting to reply to text messages.
She’s wearing cutoff denim shorts, a faded Joni Mitchell tee, and scuffed white sneakers, a smudge of chalk dust on her left elbow from grading papers at her kitchen table that morning. She smells like lavender laundry detergent and the lemon Pledge she’d used to wipe down her classroom shelves before the fair, and when she grins, the crinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes deepen. “You’re a lifesaver. I won those at the cake walk ten seconds ago, would’ve cried if I lost them,” she says, and he nods, his ears burning, because he still hasn’t figured out how to talk to pretty women without tripping over his own tongue.
The line moves slow, so they stand next to each other, the space between their shoulders shrinking to six inches, close enough he can hear the faint jingle of the silver eagle charm on her thin silver necklace over the twang of the bluegrass band playing 20 feet away. She asks him more questions about the lookout towers, leans in when he talks, like his stories about counting lightning strikes and sleeping on a cot 100 feet off the ground are the most interesting thing she’s heard all week. He keeps waiting for the awkward lull, for her to make an excuse to walk away, but it never comes. He’s fighting two conflicting urges the whole time: to lean in a little closer, let his arm brush hers, and to run straight back to his truck and drive home before anyone they know sees them standing together.
He knows what the gossips at the diner would say. Old guy chasing a woman 14 years younger, can’t get over his dead wife, preying on a teacher who works with his granddaughter. The thoughts sit sour in his throat, so he shoves them down, keeps talking, laughs when she tells him about the time his granddaughter tried to bring a pet salamander to class hidden in her lunch box. When they get to the front of the line, he pays for her brisket sandwich before she can pull her wallet out, and she rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling, so he counts that as a win.
They find a picnic table in the shade of an oak tree, sit across from each other, and she passes him a pickle from her jar without asking. His fingers brush hers again when he takes it, and this time he doesn’t flinch. The pickle is crisp, sour, perfect, and he tells her so. She twists the eagle charm on her necklace back and forth, the way she did when she was nervous at the parent-teacher conference, and says, “I was actually meaning to reach out to you. I want you to come talk to my class about fire ecology for our conservation unit next month. We could get a root beer float at the diner on Main first, if you want. After school tomorrow, say 3:30?”
Elroy freezes for half a second, his brain short-circuiting, because he’d been working up the nerve to ask her the exact same thing, minus the class talk part. The voice in his head screaming about gossip and age gaps and how he’s too set in his ways to let anyone new in gets drowned out by the way she’s biting her lower lip, waiting for his answer, like she’s scared he’ll say no. He says yes before he can overthink it, and the grin that spreads across her face is so bright he feels his own mouth tug up into a smile he hasn’t worn in years.
They finish their sandwiches, walk over to the craft booths together, his granddaughter long forgotten running around with her friends. She stops to look at a hand-carved wooden eagle, runs her finger over the grain, and he tells her it’s Douglas fir, same as the support beams in his old lookout tower. She tucks a strand of sun-bleached auburn hair behind her ear, and when she thinks he’s not looking, she lets her hand rest lightly on his forearm for three full seconds, warm through the thin cotton of his tee, before pointing at a group of her students racing past with cotton candy stuck to their cheeks.
