Ron Jablonski leans against the splintered plywood food table at the town’s monthly summer street dance, sweating through the collar of his faded forest green flannel, a lukewarm Pabst sweating in his grip. He’s 62, spent 22 years running a specialty mushroom farm before selling 90% of the operation two years back, now forages wild chanterelles and lion’s mane for three local restaurants and the Saturday farmers market. He told his neighbor Marnie he’d only stay an hour, just long enough to drop off the mushroom tater tots she’d begged him to make for the food contest, but she’d disappeared 40 minutes ago to dance with a retired lineman she’d been flirting with for weeks, and Ron’s too stubborn to leave without saying goodbye. The air smells like fried bologna sandwiches, citronella candles, and the sweet, sharp tang of cut clover from the park strip next to the street. The fiddle player scratches out a fast version of *Folsom Prison Blues*, and the crowd hoots, couples spinning so fast their shirts ride up their backs.
He spots her across the table when she reaches for a second tot, red hair streaked with silver pulled back in a messy braid, cutoff denim shirt open over a ribbed white tank top, scuffed brown cowboy boots caked with trail dust. It takes him three full seconds to place her, and when he does, his throat goes dry. Maeve Carter. Linda’s first cousin, 14 years younger than his late wife, the last time he saw her she was 17, running away from her parents’ house, crashing on his and Linda’s couch for a week, eating all their frozen pizza and listening to Nirvana so loud the walls shook. She’s 48 now, travel nurse, just in town for a three month ER locum gig, he’d gotten a short Facebook message from her three weeks prior saying she might look him up, he’d left it on read, too weirded out by the thought of anyone from Linda’s old family showing up in his small corner of the mountains.
She meets his eye before he can look away, grins, and picks up two more tots before walking over, her boots thudding against the asphalt. “You still make these exactly like Linda taught you,” she says when she’s close enough to talk over the music, and her voice is deeper than he remembers, rough around the edges from years of yelling over ER beeps and crowds. She leans in a little to be heard, her shoulder pressing against his bicep, and he can smell pine soap and lavender hand sanitizer on her skin, undercut with the faint, briny smell of hospital antiseptic that never fully washes off medical workers’ clothes. He tenses for half a second, then relaxes, the warmth of her arm seeping through the thin flannel of his shirt.
He doesn’t mean to talk to her for as long as he does. She teases him about the ponytail he’s got his graying hair pulled back in, says he looks like a discount folk singer, and he teases her back about the neon pink stethoscope peeking out of her backpack, says it looks like something a teenager would buy at Claire’s. She reaches across at one point to brush a piece of pine sawdust off his left forearm, right over the thick, pale scar he got from a chainsaw accident last fall, and her fingers brush his skin, calloused from hiking and lifting patients, and he feels a jolt go up his spine that he hasn’t felt since before Linda got sick. He’s immediately disgusted with himself, the familiar burn of guilt settling in his chest. This is Linda’s cousin. He’d watched her blow out the candles on her 18th birthday cake at their kitchen table. This is wrong.
But he doesn’t step away. He tells her about selling the farm, about the days he spends 8 hours in the woods alone, and she tells him about working ER shifts through the worst of the pandemic, about the patients who died alone, about the way she started taking solo backpacking trips on her days off to stop having panic attacks in her car after shifts. She doesn’t tiptoe around Linda’s name, doesn’t give him that sad, pitying look everyone in town gives him when his wife comes up. She laughs when she tells the story of Linda dying her hair neon pink for a 90s themed party in 2007, and Ron laughs too, so hard he snorts beer out of his nose, and she cackles so loud a couple next to them glances over.
The band slows down, starts playing a soft, twangy cover of *Stand By Me*, and couples pull in close, swaying slow. Maeve tilts her head at him, holds out her hand. “C’mon. I know you can dance, Linda told me you won a country swing contest in 1998.” He freezes, every alarm bell in his head going off. This is too far. He’ll look like the sad old fool he’s spent years making fun of, chasing a younger woman related to his dead wife. But she’s still holding her hand out, grinning, no pity in her eyes, no expectation, just the same playful glint she had when she was 17 and dared him to sneak her a beer at that 18th birthday party.
He takes her hand. She’s lighter than he expects when he pulls her in, her left hand resting on his waist, his right hand on her hip, the denim of her shorts rough under his palm. They sway slow, not really dancing, just moving to the music, and when she rests her head on his chest for a second, her hair brushing his jaw, he can hear her breath catch a little. “I never told you this,” she says, quiet enough only he can hear, “but when I stayed with you guys that week, I had the biggest crush on you. Thought you were the nicest man I’d ever met.” The guilt cuts sharp for half a second, then softens, overwhelmed by the quiet, warm relief of being seen as more than just Linda’s widower for the first time in years.
They leave the dance 10 minutes later, no fanfare, no big discussion, just him grabbing his cooler of leftover tots and her slinging her backpack over her shoulder, following him to his beat up 2008 Ford F-150. He drives them back to his A-frame, the windows rolled down, the cool mountain air rushing through the cab, crickets chirping loud in the trees on the side of the road. He makes peppermint tea when they get inside, pulls two mugs down from the cabinet, the chipped blue one Linda used to use, the plain white one he keeps for guests. He carries them out to the porch swing, where she’s already sitting, kicking her boots off, her socked feet propped up on the porch rail, watching fireflies blink on and off in the dark woods at the edge of his property.
When he sits down next to her, their thighs press together through their jeans, and he doesn’t move away. He hands her the blue mug, and she reaches for it, her thumb brushing the thin, silvery scar on his wrist from an old mushroom knife accident when he was 30. He doesn’t pull away.
