Manny Ruiz, 53, hauled a crate of dill pickles he’d brined himself into the Emmet County Lions Club hall Friday night, work boots still crusted with pine bark from that morning’s oak split run. He’d spent 19 years perched in 100-foot fire lookout towers across the Upper Peninsula before a lightning strike fried his left knee and forced early retirement, now he ran a one-man firewood delivery outfit that kept him busy enough he rarely had to make small talk with anyone longer than it took to hand over a receipt. His worst flaw, the one he’d carefully hidden for 12 years, was that he’d not so much as held a woman’s hand since his wife left him for a fellow park ranger, convinced any romantic entanglement was just a dry tinder pile waiting to burn down the quiet, low-stakes life he’d painstakingly built.
The hall smelled like fried cod, apple cider vinegar, and the cheap beer the local bar donated for the weekly fish fry. He grabbed a heaping plate, skipped the usual crowd of guys he’d graduated high school with, and slid into the empty seat at the far end of the last table, far enough from the speakers that the old country music didn’t make his ears ring. He was three bites into his cod when Lila Marlow sat down next to him.
She was 38, the new county librarian who’d moved to town six months prior, married to a roughneck who’d been working an oil rig in North Dakota for eight months with no plans to come home before spring. Manny had dropped three cords of maple at her rental house back in September, had noticed the stack of western paperbacks on her porch, had avoided eye contact when she’d asked him if he’d ever read Louis L’Amour. The whole town knew better than to mess with married women whose husbands had family on the local sheriff’s department, and Manny had spent long enough staying out of trouble to know better.
She sat so close her wool peacoat sleeve brushed the bare skin of his forearm where his flannel was rolled up. She smelled like cinnamon gum and old paper and the pine air freshener she kept in her beat-up Ford F150. Her knee knocked his under the table when she leaned over to grab a napkin from the stack by his plate, and she didn’t yank it away right away, just held it there for two, three beats, before she smiled and apologized, her brown eyes holding his longer than was strictly polite for a small town where everyone knew everyone’s business. She mentioned she’d left a stack of L’Amour paperbacks on his cabin porch two days prior, had figured he’d like them since his truck had a Sackett bumper sticker. He’d wondered who’d left those, had already finished the first two, had told himself he was just bored, not curious.
The knot in his stomach twisted tight. Half of him was disgusted with the way his pulse picked up when she laughed at his dumb joke about the time a bear broke into his lookout tower and ate all his beef jerky. The other half was warm, almost giddy, the way he hadn’t felt since he was 20 and taking his first date to the drive-in. No one had asked him about his tower days in years, not even his own brothers. She knew exactly what he meant when he talked about the way the night sky looked from 100 feet up, no streetlights for 30 miles, so bright you could see the Milky Way spill across the horizon. She’d spent two years working at a visitor center in Yellowstone before she got married, knew the names of all the constellations he used to map when he was pulling overnight shifts.
The snow started sticking to the window behind them halfway through her story about the time a moose chased her through a parking lot. She leaned in closer when she said she had a flat tire out in the parking lot, didn’t know how to change it, didn’t trust any of the drunk guys by the bar to help her without hitting on her the whole time. He hesitated for a full five seconds, his knee still touching hers, before he nodded, grabbing his coat off the back of the chair.
The parking lot was dark, snow flurries sticking to his hair and the collar of his coat. He knelt down to loosen the lug nuts, his bad knee aching in the cold, while she held the flashlight for him. Her hand brushed the back of his neck when she brushed a snowflake off his collar, and he froze, his grip tightening on the tire iron. He looked up at her, and she was leaning down, her face inches from his, the flashlight glinting off the silver hoop earring in her left ear.
