Something slams into his side, cold sweet strawberry lemonade splattering across his faded gray work tee. He curses under his breath, glancing down, and faces Lila Marlow, 38, Karen’s youngest niece. A streak of silver cuts through her chestnut half-updo, freckles splash across her nose, a well-worn flannel is tied around her waist, and pine sawdust cakes the knee of her cutoff denim shorts. She laughs so hard she snorts, holding a crumpled lemonade cup in one hand, and gestures to a golden retriever trotting down the sidewalk with half a corndog hanging out of her mouth. “Mabel stole that from a seven-year-old,” she gasps, swiping a napkin from her pocket and dabbing at the wet spot on his shirt. Her knuckles brush his sternum, warm through thin cotton, and his skin prickles like he touched a live wire.
He hasn’t seen her since her mom’s funeral five years prior, when she lived in Portland, married to a software sales guy who wore boat shoes everywhere and never took off his designer sunglasses indoors. She says she left him six months ago, moved back to run her mom’s used bookstore, and wanted to reach out but heard he’s a hermit who shoots at trespassers near his cabin. She teases him, says Karen always joked Cole would rather fight a 10,000-acre wildfire than make small talk at a birthday party. He grins before he can stop himself; that’s exactly what Karen used to say. She stands close, her shoulder almost pressed to his, close enough he smells coconut shampoo, pine sawdust, and faint sweet lemonade. A group of teens on dirt bikes swerves past, and she steps closer, her thigh pressing firm to his. He doesn’t move away.
Shame twists in his gut a split second later. This is Karen’s niece, 20 years younger than him, and everyone in this 7,000-person town would gossip so loud it’d reach the foothills if they stood next to each other longer than five minutes. The voice in his head snarls this is wrong, that he’s betraying the woman he married 28 years, that he should say goodbye, climb in his truck, and forget this ever happened. But then she tilts her head, nods toward the dive bar two doors down, says their beer is way better than the dance’s watery swill, and way quieter too, if he wants to escape the noise. He hesitates, then nods.
The bar smells like peanut shells and old bourbon, and they slide into a back booth strung with dim flickering fairy lights, the only other patron the bartender curled up on a stool reading a pulp western. She tells him she’s been fixing up the bookstore, sanding original oak shelves, patching a 2020 hailstorm hole in the back wall, and found a box of Karen’s old books tucked under floorboards last week. She slides a tattered *To Kill a Mockingbird* across the table, margins filled with Karen’s messy looping handwriting: notes about the cute firefighter who helped her change a flat, who hates broccoli, loves Merle Haggard, might be the one. Cole’s throat tightens; he hasn’t seen Karen’s handwriting in years.
She rests her hand on top of his across the table, her palm calloused from sanding shelves, fingers smudged with ink from stamping book spines. She says Karen called her a month before she died, told her if she ever moved back to Emmett, she should look after Cole, that he’d be too stubborn to look after himself. She admits she’s had a crush on him since she was 16, came to visit for summer break, saw him fixing the backyard fence shirtless, covered in sweat and sawdust, brought him iced tea and spilled half down his back. He laughs out loud; he remembers that day, thought she was the skittish kid who never said more than two words to him the whole two weeks she stayed.
He doesn’t pull his hand away. The guilt is still there, thick in the back of his throat, the voice still muttering about betrayal and wrong turns, but it’s quieter now, drowned out by the beer cooler’s low hum, the soft lilt of her voice, the steady warmth of her hand on his. He can’t remember the last time someone looked at him like he was more than a grieving widower, more than a retired hotshot who lived alone in the woods. He tells her he’d like to see the rest of the books she found.
They leave the bar an hour later, the street dance long over, only sounds crickets chirping and a distant semi on the highway. Mabel curls on the bookstore porch, chewing the last of the corndog. Lila unlocks the front door, and the smell of old paper, leather bindings, and vanilla candle wax drifts into the cool night. She steps inside, looks over her shoulder, grins, and holds the door open for him. He pauses for half a second, kicks a loose pebble across the sidewalk, then steps across the threshold.
