Clay Bennett is 58, retired shop teacher, spent 32 years teaching kids how to swap a transmission and patch a rusted fender without burning through the sheet metal. His biggest flaw is that he holds grudges like he’s storing them for a hard winter—he still won’t speak to the neighbor who backed into his 1972 Ford F-150 in 2019, still hasn’t set foot in the local public library since the board banned his late wife Elara’s favorite Joan Didion collection three months prior. He’d left 17 angry voicemails for the new library director before his best friend Mike talked him into coming to the library’s summer block party, saying the free beer was worth swallowing his pride for an hour.
It’s 82 degrees, humidity thick enough to leave a film on the back of his neck, the air thick with the smell of grilled onions from the food truck and cut grass from the park next door. Tom Petty hums from a crackling lawn speaker tucked under a folding table stacked with banned book flyers. Clay leans against an oak tree, sipping a cold IPA, scowling at the group of library board members huddled by the cotton candy machine, when he spots her.
She’s leaning against the next table over, wiping sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand, wearing a faded 1977 Fleetwood Mac tour t-shirt, cutoff denim shorts, and scuffed steel-toe work boots, no glasses, no frumpy cardigan, nothing like the stuffy bureaucrat he’d pictured when he left those voicemails. He pushes off the tree, already halfway through the argument he’s rehearsed in his head for weeks, when she looks up, locks eyes with him across the 10 feet of grass between them, and smirks like she knows exactly what he’s about to say.
“You’re Clay,” she says when he gets close enough to hear her over the crowd. “The guy who left the 17 voicemails about the Didion ban. I listened to every single one.” He trips over a loose paving stone, his elbow knocking a half-full can of lemonade off the edge of the table, it splatters all over the toe of her left boot. He panics, grabs a handful of napkins off the stack next to him, bends down to wipe it off, his knuckle brushing the bare skin of her ankle just above the boot’s collar. She doesn’t pull away, just laughs, a low, rough sound like she smokes menthols after work. “Relax. These boots have been through worse than lemonade. For the record, I agreed with you. Fought the board for three weeks before they voted me down. I’m Maren, by the way.”
He stands up, suddenly aware of how close she’s standing, her shoulder almost touching his, the smell of coconut shampoo mixed with summer sweat and the faint tang of lime seltzer on her breath. He’d spent the last three years shutting down any flicker of interest in anyone else, disgusted with himself for even considering feeling something that wasn’t grief for Elara, but there’s a warm, tight pull in his chest he can’t ignore, the kind he hasn’t felt since he was 19 and asked Elara out to the drive-in for the first time.
They talk for an hour, first about the ban, then about Elara, how she’d read Didion every July on their back porch while he grilled burgers, then about Maren’s mom, who’d given her that same Didion collection for her 16th birthday. She steps closer when a group of kids runs past, her arm pressing against his for half a second before she pulls back, just enough to be polite, her eyes not leaving his face the whole time. He notices the small silver hoop in her left ear, exactly like the ones Elara wore every day for 34 years.
The sun dips below the tree line, the string lights strung between the oaks flicker on, the crowd thins out until it’s just the two of them and a handful of volunteers packing up folding chairs. Maren reaches for a stack of flyers on the table next to him, her hand brushing his, calloused from hauling boxes of books around the library, warm even in the cooling air. “I’m heading to the dive bar down the street after I load all this into the truck,” she says, nodding at the beat up city pickup parked by the curb. “We can plan how to annoy the board into reversing the ban, if you want. I’ve got a whole list of petty loopholes they didn’t think about.”
Clay hesitates for half a second, the old guilt flaring, the voice in his head saying he should go home to the empty house, the porch swing where Elara used to sit, the stack of her Didion books on the coffee table. But then he looks at Maren, grinning, her cheeks pink from the sun, a smudge of cotton candy blue on her wrist, and that tight pull in his chest wins out. He nods, grabs a stack of folding chairs off the grass, their fingers brushing again when she hands him a roll of duct tape to secure the stack in the truck bed. He follows her to the pickup, already running through the list of arguments he’s going to bring to the next board meeting, already wondering if she likes extra pepperoni on her pizza, the same as he does.
