Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 28 years as a smokejumper, leaping out of planes into burning western forest stands before a blown knee and a messy divorce pushed him into a quieter life foraging wild mushrooms for Portland’s top farm-to-table spots. He’s gruff by habit, keeps his silver beard cropped short so burrs don’t stick, and has avoided the annual Hood River County Fair for eight straight years, convinced small town crowds and forced small talk are a waste of the quiet he’s fought hard to build. His regular client, the chef at a bistro downtown, begged him to enter his chanterelle exhibit in the agricultural contest this year, promising a 20% raise on his weekly foraging contract if he did, so he caved.
He’s standing by the exhibit tables filling out his entry form when a woman’s elbow brushes his bicep, warm through his threadbare flannel. He flinches on instinct, hasn’t let anyone get within arm’s length for longer than a commercial break in years, and turns to snap a complaint before he gets a good look at her. She’s leaning across the booth next to his, handing a sticky-faced kid a tiny plastic spoonful of peach jam, her dark hair streaked with gray pulled back in a loose braid, a smudge of apricot pulp on her left cheek. She smells like clove and ripe stone fruit, mixed with the faint vanilla of her lip balm, and the sharp retort dies in his throat.
She turns back to him after the kid runs off to the cotton candy stand, grinning, and holds up the entry form he’d dropped when he flinched. Their fingers brush when she passes it to him, her palm calloused at the fingertips, nails painted soft terracotta with a fleck of acrylic paint stuck to the edge of her thumb. “Figured you’d need this,” she says, nodding at the stack of golden chanterelles in his crate. “Those are the nicest I’ve seen all year. Mine are just jam, so you won’t have any competition from my booth.”
He grunts a thanks, shoves the form into the hands of the teen running the contest table, and tells himself he can leave as soon as the awards are announced in an hour. He leans against the wooden post next to her booth, tries to ignore the way she laughs when a toddler tries to steal a whole jar of blackberry jam, tries to ignore the way her shoulder brushes his every time she leans out to hand a sample to a passerby. His chest feels tight, half irritation at himself for caring, half the quiet, forgotten fizz of attraction he thought died when his wife moved out.
He doesn’t realize he’s been staring when she turns to him again, holding out a small sample spoon of peach habanero jam. “C’mon,” she teases, waggling the spoon between them. “I won’t poison you. Clara, by the way. I teach art at the elementary school, make jam in my kitchen on weekends. Widowed six years, if you’re wondering why I’m here talking to a grumpy mushroom guy instead of my husband.”
The jam is sweet at first, then burns slow at the back of his throat, good enough that he finds himself asking for a second sample before he can stop himself. He tells her his name, what he does, the dumb story of how he broke his knee jumping into a fire outside Bend when he was 54, and she laughs so hard she snorts, her hand landing on his forearm for half a second, fingers brushing the thin, silvery scar that snakes up from his wrist to his elbow. He doesn’t flinch this time.
The announcer calls the contest results ten minutes later, yelling into a crackling mic over the roar of the ferris wheel. Ronan takes first place for wild foraged produce, Clara takes first for specialty jams, and they both laugh when the announcer teases that the “power couple of the agricultural hall” can pick up their ribbons and $50 gift cards to the local feed store after the ceremony. She grabs his arm again, this time on purpose, as they walk up to the table, and his skin feels hot under her touch.
He asks her if she wants to split a funnel cake before he can overthink it, and she says yes immediately, squeezing his arm before she lets go to lock up her booth. They sit on a splintered wooden bench near the ride entrance, the warm, greasy cake dusted with powdered sugar between them, the fair lights painting streaks of pink and blue across the grass at their feet. She gets a smudge of powdered sugar on her upper lip, and he reaches over without hesitating, wipes it off with the pad of his thumb.
She leans into the touch for half a second, her eyes soft, before she takes a bite of funnel cake and grins at him, asking if he wants to come over to her house the next day to can the last of the peaches from her tree. He says yes before he can remind himself he’s supposed to like being alone. The ferris wheel creaks as it turns above them, a kid yells somewhere across the fairgrounds, and he tucks a loose strand of hair that fell out of her braid behind her ear, his fingers brushing her cheek.
