Rudy Galvan, 62, retired high school welding instructor who now builds custom fire pits for homeowners within a 30-mile radius of his small northwest Ohio town, had avoided the annual summer street fair for eight straight years. His ex-wife’s entire extended family set up booths every year, and Rudy hated the forced small talk, the pitying looks, the way they’d always slip him passive aggressive updates on her new life in Cleveland. The only reason he showed up this year was his 16-year-old grandson, Jax, who’d begged him to come watch the go-kart demo he’d spent three months building in Rudy’s workshop.
The air hung thick and sticky, heavy with the smell of fried Oreos, cut grass, and burnt sugar from the kettle corn booth his ex’s sister ran three stalls down from the race route. He’d stuffed his hands in the pockets of his grease-stained flannel, rolled up to the elbows to beat the heat, and was lingering by a lemonade stand when he heard a laugh he’d not heard in almost a decade.
He turned, and there she was. Marnie Cole, 58, his ex’s former best friend, the woman his ex had spent 20 years complaining was “too reckless to ever settle down”, leaning over a wooden booth stacked high with mason jars of jam, wiping a bead of sweat off her upper lip with the back of her sun-tanned hand. Her silver hoop earrings glinted in the golden hour light, and when she spotted him, she froze for half a second before her mouth split into the same wide, mischievous grin he remembered from his 40th birthday party, when she’d snuck him a shot of tequila behind his ex’s back.
He almost turned and walked away. The unspoken rule in town was you didn’t fraternize with your ex’s best friend, not after a divorce as messy as theirs had been. He could already hear the whispers, the way the gossip would spread to his ex by the end of the weekend, the nasty text he’d get calling him selfish and immature. But Marnie waved him over before he could make a move, and his feet carried him across the pavement before his brain could catch up.
She leaned across the booth as he got close, so close he could smell the coconut sunscreen she’d slathered on and the faint vanilla of her perfume, no fancy department store stuff, just the same drugstore scent she’d worn since the 90s. “I heard you moved back last month,” he said, nodding at the stack of jam jars labeled with handwritten markers. He felt stupid the second the words left his mouth, like he was admitting he’d been asking around about her, which he had, not that he’d ever say that out loud.
“Got tired of Florida humidity and lazy old men who only wanted to talk about their golf scores,” she said, picking up a jar of blackberry jam and twisting the lid off. She held out a plastic tasting spoon, and when he reached for it, his knuckles brushed hers, warm and calloused from gardening, and he felt a jolt go up his arm that had nothing to do with the stray static from the fair’s power cords.
He tasted the jam, sweet and tart, seeds catching between his molars, and he remembered she’d brought a jar of the exact same stuff to his house when he’d torn his ACL building a deck back in 2015. His ex had thrown it out, said it “had too much sugar”. The thought made his chest tight, a weird mix of anger at his ex and a quiet, fluttery excitement he hadn’t felt since he was a teenager sneaking out to drag race on back roads.
She teased him about the silver welding burn scar snaking up his left forearm, the one he’d gotten when a kid in his class had knocked a torch out of his hand senior year. She leaned even further across the booth, her shoulder brushing his when she pointed at it, and he didn’t pull away. The crowd around them was distracted by the go-karts revving down the street, Jax waving wildly as he passed, and for a second it felt like they were the only two people there.
“You got plans after the fair shuts down?” she asked, tucking a stray oak leaf that had blown into his graying hair behind his ear, her palm brushing his cheek for half a second. He froze, his first instinct to say no, to go home to his empty house, to heat up a frozen meatloaf dinner and watch old westerns like he did every Saturday night. He thought about the gossip, about the way his ex would scream at him over the phone, about how everyone in town would call him a traitor. Then he thought about how quiet his house was, how he hadn’t laughed with anyone who wasn’t his grandson in months.
“Nah,” he said, surprising himself. “Got a six pack of that homebrewed IPA I make in my garage in the truck.”
She grinned, scribbling her address on a scrap of paper and shoving it in his flannel pocket, her fingers lingering on his chest through the fabric. “Good. I got a peach pie on my counter that’s still warm. Just don’t tell anyone I invited you.”
By 10 PM, the fair lights were long out of sight, the only light coming from the string lights strung across Marnie’s back porch and the small portable fire pit Rudy had tossed in the bed of his truck on his way over. The pie was half eaten on the porch rail, crumbs dusting the edge of the wooden slat, and crickets chirped loud in the oak trees lining her backyard. She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he wrapped his arm around her, the fabric of her linen dress soft under his calloused hand. He didn’t care if the neighbor across the street saw them, didn’t care if the gossip spread to his ex by Sunday morning, didn’t care about any of the stupid unspoken rules he’d spent 8 years following just to keep the peace.
He picked up the half-empty jar of blackberry jam sitting on the porch step, twisted the lid off, and dipped his finger in for another taste, grinning when she swatted his hand away playfully.
