The seat across from him scraped against the plywood floor before he could look up, and a woman slid into it, setting a can of lime seltzer on the sticky table between them. He recognized her immediately: Marnie Hale, 48, the county’s new tax assessor, the woman who’d sent him three letters over the past two months asking him to consult on a stack of suspicious easement documents for old farm properties along the St. Croix River. He’d ignored every one. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, and the edge of her worn black leather vest brushed his forearm when she reached to tuck a strand of chestnut hair streaked with silver behind her ear. She had a thin scar slicing through her left eyebrow, the one her mother Clara had told him about, the result of a spooked goat headbutting her at the 1987 4-H show. That detail hit him like a punch to the sternum. He’d spent three days with Clara 8 years prior, holed up in his cabin helping her fight a property dispute with her ex-husband. No one had known they’d even met, let alone that they’d spent two nights tangled up in his flannel sheets before she drove back to Minneapolis and never called again.
He opened his mouth to say he still wasn’t taking on side work, but she grinned before he could speak, the corner of her mouth tucking up the same way Clara’s did when she was about to call someone out on their nonsense. “I know you helped my mom win that property case,” she said, her voice low enough that the couple yelling about ride tickets next to them couldn’t hear. “I found all your notes in her files after she died last spring. She said you were the only person who ever took the time to listen to her instead of telling her she was overreacting.” He froze, his fingers tightening around his beer cup. He’d had no idea Clara was dead, had spent years half-wondering if he’d see her at the grocery store, if she’d even remember his name. Marnie’s knee brushed his under the table, warm through the worn denim of his jeans, and he smelled coconut shampoo mixed with campfire smoke drifting over from the fair’s bonfire pit. She held his gaze, hazel eyes flecked with gold, no look of judgment, no sign she was angry that he’d been involved with her mom. He felt the familiar tug of his old habit, scanning her face for tells, for the flicker of a lie, for some hidden agenda, but all he saw was open curiosity, the same soft interest he’d seen in Clara’s face the first time they met.
He told himself it was wrong, that getting involved with the daughter of a woman he’d slept with was the kind of messy, unmoored choice he’d spent his whole adult life avoiding, that it would lead to nothing but county gossip, nothing but the same kind of betrayal he’d felt when his ex left. But when she reached across the table and tapped the frayed stitch on his flannel cuff, her fingers warm and calloused from years of riding the horses she kept on her small farm outside Ellsworth, the resistance melted a little. “I know about the weekend you two spent at your cabin,” she said, so quiet he almost missed it over the band’s transition to “Jack and Diane.” “She told me about it when I was going through my divorce last year. Said it was the only time she ever felt like she didn’t have to perform for anyone. I’ve wanted to meet you ever since I read those notes, ever since she told me how you notice all the tiny things no one else bothers to look at.” The disgust he’d expected to feel at crossing that line never came. Instead, he felt a lightness he hadn’t felt in decades, the thrill of not knowing what came next, of not having to pick apart every word for a hidden meaning.
He finished his beer, wiped the foam from his mustache with the back of his hand, and asked her if she wanted to walk over to the oak grove at the edge of the fairgrounds, where the band noise died down and you could see ferris wheel lights through the tree branches. She stood, slung her worn canvas bag over her shoulder, and laced her fingers through his when he joined her. He didn’t over-analyze the pattern of calluses on her palm, didn’t wonder if the way she squeezed his hand was a sign of something permanent or just a one-off, didn’t scan the crowd for familiar faces who might judge. They walked past the cotton candy stand, past a group of teens yelling as they ran to the bumper cars, the band’s sound fading behind them, and she leaned in to bump her shoulder against his when a breeze carried the sharp smell of pine over the fairgrounds.
