He’s just about to flag down a beer vendor when someone slides into the seat across from him uninvited, the metal legs of the chair scraping loud enough to cut through the country twang. He looks up, and his jaw tightens immediately. It’s Clara Bennett, 44, the first-term at-large council rep who spearheaded the budget cut, the woman he’s left three unhinged, all-caps comments under on the town’s Facebook group, the name he’s cursed every time he’s had to patch a rotting table leg with scrap wood from his garage. She’s wearing cutoff jean shorts and a faded 1990s park district softball t-shirt, her blonde hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, a smudge of trail dirt on her left ankle, and she’s grinning like she already knows he’s two seconds from telling her to get lost.
He leans back further, crosses his arms over his faded Carhartt shirt, and opens his mouth to snap, but she beats him to it, leaning forward across the table so her elbow brushes the neck of his beer bottle, her voice low and warm, no polished politician lilt to it. She says she
