Elias Voss, 53, retired high-rise ironworker, leaned against the chipped cinder block wall of his local VFW’s outdoor pavilion, grease smudged on his worn Carhartt knee and a half-drunk Budweiser longneck dangling from his right hand. He’d fixed the fryer’s busted propane line an hour prior, turned down the free meal the post commander offered, and planned to leave as soon as he finished his beer. Eight years before, his wife had packed a duffel and left while he was on a Cleveland job, and he’d kept to himself ever since, convinced his calloused hands, permanent limp from a 12-foot fall, and tendency to go three days without speaking made him too much of a hassle for anyone to bother with. The only people he spoke to regularly were post regulars and Marnie, his 72-year-old next door neighbor who brought him peach pie every Fourth of July.
Mid-May air smelled like fried cod, cajun-dusted hushpuppies, and cut grass. A tinny rafter speaker blared Tom Petty’s *Free Fallin’*, kids chased each other around picnic tables with popsicles dripping down their wrists, and he was just about to push off the wall to head home when someone stepped into the space next to him, close enough their shoulder brushed his bad side. He tensed, ready to mumble an excuse to leave, before he looked down and recognized her.
It was Lila, Marnie’s niece. He’d last seen her at 17, pigtailed and acne-prone, begging him to teach her to skip stones at the nearby lake. Now she was 49, silver-streaked dark hair pulled in a loose braid, jeans fitting snug across her hips, a faded Fleetwood Mac tee stretched across her shoulders. She smelled like jasmine and lemon seltzer, and when she grinned, the same gap between her two front teeth remained. “You’re still wearing those beat-up steel toes?” she said, nodding at his scuffed work boots, toes dented from years of catching falling rebar. “I swear you had those when I was 12.”
He blinked, unsure what to say. Marnie had mentioned Lila was in town to help sell her house, that she’d moved to Portland 20 years prior to design book covers, but he hadn’t expected her to show up to the fry, let alone talk to him. When she reached past him to grab napkins off the folding table behind him, her elbow brushed the faint silvery scar snaking up his left forearm, the one from the fall. He flinched before he could stop himself, and she paused, fingers hovering over his arm for half a second, dark eyes softening. “That still gives you trouble?” she said, quiet enough no one else could hear.
The logical part of his brain screamed this was a bad idea. Marnie was his neighbor, he’d known Lila since she was a kid, he shouldn’t notice how her t-shirt rode up a little when she reached for a hushpuppy, shouldn’t lean in closer to smell that jasmine again, shouldn’t enjoy the way she looked at him like he was more than the quiet broken guy who fixed her aunt’s gutter every fall. He opened his mouth to mumble an excuse to leave, but she cut him off, tilting her head. “I was gonna drive out to that overlook you used to take me to, the one where you can see the whole valley,” she said. “I haven’t been there in 30 years. Wanna come? I’ll buy you a beer on the way.” He hesitated 10 full seconds, voices in his head screaming he’d mess this up, that he was too old, too rough, too set in his ways, that this crossed a line he shouldn’t cross. Then he nodded.
They drove out in his beat-up 2008 Ford F150, windows rolled down, wind tangling Lila’s braid, John Prine playing on the truck’s crackling radio. When they pulled up to the overlook, the sun was just dipping below the treeline, painting the sky pink and tangerine, the valley dotted with farmhouses and greening cornfields. They climbed onto the truck hood, legs brushing as they sat side by side, and she passed him a cold IPA she’d grabbed at the gas station. She teased him about the summer she was 13, when he’d taught her to skip stones and she’d accidentally hit a mallard, sending it squawking across the water, and he’d lied to Marnie saying he’d thrown the rock. He laughed, loud and rough, the kind of laugh he hadn’t let out in years, and she smiled, eyes crinkling at the corners.
He told her about the fall, about quitting ironworking a year later when his knee couldn’t handle heights anymore, about his wife leaving six months after that, about spending the last eight years fixing things for neighbors, keeping to himself, convinced he was better off alone. She told him about her divorce two years prior, about getting sick of Portland’s endless rain, about thinking of moving back to Ohio, buying a small country house. When she leaned her head on his shoulder for a second, hair tickling his neck, he didn’t pull away.
The sun sank lower, the sky turning deep purple, fireflies starting to blink in the trees at the edge of the overlook. Crickets chirped in the grass below. She reached over, lacing her fingers through his, her skin soft against the rough calluses and the raised edge of his old scar. He didn’t flinch.
