Ray Voss, 58, retired lineworker, had manned the fire department cookoff pulled pork booth for 19 straight years, and he’d never once been caught off guard by a stranger. Not when a drunk guy spilled a whole pitcher of sweet tea on his boots in 2017, not when a tornado warning cleared the fairgrounds mid-serve in 2019. His biggest flaw, he’d admit if pressed, was that he’d spent the two decades since his messy divorce avoiding any situation that could be labeled “unnecessary hassle” — no second dates, no town council fights, no associating with anyone the local VFW crowd had labeled a troublemaker.
That’s why he tensed the second he spotted Clara Bennett walking toward his booth. 52, the town’s new librarian, she’d moved to rural Ohio six months prior from Portland, and she’d already made half the town’s enemies by pushing back against the local school board’s book ban. The guys at his weekly poker game called her a “nutjob liberal” who was “corrupting the kids”, and everyone had made it clear associating with her was social suicide for anyone who wanted to keep going to the VFW fish fries. She was wearing cutoff jeans and a faded Tom Petty t-shirt, copper streaks catching the August sun where it filtered through the oak tree overhead, and she was carrying a canvas tote slung over one shoulder, the banned book sticker on the side bright enough to see from ten feet away.
He grunted when she stopped in front of the table, the plastic sticky with barbecue sauce and sweat from the 90-degree heat. “Sample’s three bucks. Plates are ten.”
She leaned in a little, elbows resting on the table edge, close enough he could smell lemon Pledge and soft vanilla perfume over the hickory smoke and charcoal fumes hanging over the fairgrounds. “Heard yours is the only booth here that doesn’t skimp on the dry rub. Figured I’d test the rumor.”
When he passed her the small paper sample cup, her fingers brushed the thick, gnarled scar running down his left forearm — the one he’d gotten in 2012, fixing a downed power line in the middle of a derecho, when a live wire arced and burned straight through his work glove. He flinched before he could stop himself, and her gaze flicked down to the mark, then back up to his face. She didn’t look away when a group of three guys he’d played high school football with walked past, glaring at her so hard their necks went red. “That look like a power line injury. My dad was a lineman in Oregon. Had the same exact scar, same arm.”
Ray froze. He’d had a dozen people ask about that scar over the years, and every single one had made a big dramatic deal out of it, acting like he was some kind of hero. No one had ever just recognized it for what it was. He found himself leaning over the table too, his forearms resting next to hers, close enough he could feel the heat coming off her sun-warmed skin. “2012 derecho. Spent three days in the burn unit, missed my niece’s wedding. Got a free t-shirt out of it, though.”
She laughed, a warm, throaty sound that cut through the buzz of the crowd and the country music blaring from the speaker by the beer tent. The corner of her eyes crinkled when she smiled, and she swiped a finger across the edge of the sample cup, licking a drop of sauce off the tip. “I’ll take a full plate. And a beer, if you’ve got an extra. The guys at the beer tent refused to serve me ten minutes ago. Said I ‘don’t support the community’.”
Ray felt that old, familiar surge of frustration at the small town gossip mill, the same frustration he’d been shoving down for years because it was easier to go along than fight. He grabbed a foam koozie off the stack next to his cooler, popped the top on a lager, and slid it across the table to her. He didn’t care if the guys across the fairground were staring. He’d spent 20 years doing what everyone else wanted, and what did he have to show for it? A quiet house, a truck that ran, a poker game where all anyone talked about was who was screwing who and what the librarians were ruining this week.
They talked for 45 minutes while the line for his booth died down, while the sun dipped below the treeline and the crickets started chirping in the grass at the edge of the fairgrounds. She told him about the after-school book club she ran for the kids whose parents wouldn’t let them check out the “banned” books, how she’d been eating frozen burritos for dinner every night for three weeks because she was too busy to cook. He told her about his mom, who’d raised him on a steady diet of Louis L’Amour and Stephen King books that would have gotten banned now if the school board had their way, how he’d quit going to city council meetings because all they did was yell about nothing. When a kid on a bike went tearing past, she stepped closer to him to avoid getting hit, her shoulder pressing solid against his bicep, and neither of them moved away.
By the time the rest of the fire department crew started packing up the booths, the fairgrounds were mostly empty, the only people left the cleanup crew and a few drunks lingering by the beer tent. Clara grabbed a stack of paper plates from the table to help him load them into the back of his beat-up 2008 F150, and when he reached for the same stack, their hands touched, palm to palm, this time neither of them flinched. Her hand was soft, a little calloused at the fingertips from turning book pages, and he could feel her pulse jump under his skin.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you for weeks,” she said, quiet enough only he could hear, as he slammed the tailgate shut. “Saw you carry Mrs. Henderson’s groceries out of the IGA last month, stayed for 20 minutes helping her fix her porch step. Knew you weren’t like the other guys who yell at me during public comment.”
Ray scratched the back of his neck, feeling that old, rusty feeling of shyness he hadn’t felt since he was a teenager. “I avoided you ‘cause I didn’t want the hassle. Everyone’s been talking so much crap about you, figured if I got seen talking to you, I’d get dragged into all the drama.” He nodded at her tote bag, the banned book sticker glinting under the parking lot floodlights. “For what it’s worth, I think the book ban’s the stupidest thing this town’s ever done. My mom would’ve lost her mind if someone tried to take her westerns away.”
She smiled, and he could see the flush on her cheeks even in the dim light. He walked around to the passenger side of the truck, pulling the door open for her, the old metal squeaking loud in the quiet. “You wanna get dinner? There’s a diner 20 minutes out of town, no one from here ever goes there. They make a mean meatloaf.”
She slid into the passenger seat, setting her tote bag at her feet, and he shut the door behind her before walking around to the driver’s side. He turned the key in the ignition, and Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” blared from the old radio speakers, the same station he’d listened to for 30 years.
He reached over to adjust the AC vent so it was blowing on her, his hand brushing her knee for half a second, and she didn’t move away.
