Ray Voss, 58, retired county lineman, has spent the last six years perfecting the art of being left alone. His old crew teases him for still wearing scuffed work boots to every town event, for keeping his wedding band on six years after his wife Sue passed from breast cancer, for turning down every blind date their wives set up. He’s stubborn to a fault, convinced letting anyone new get close is begging for more grief, and he’s got no patience for the small-town drama clogging the local Facebook group. He only showed up to the annual fire department pig roast because his former foreman Jimmie threatened to drop a bag of manure on his porch if he bailed again.
The sun hangs low over the oak trees, gilding the edges of charcoal smoke curling up from the roasters, and the air smells like burnt pork, sour mash beer, and sweet artificial syrup from the snow cone stand. Kids scream as they bounce off the inflatable obstacle course walls, and the newly elected mayor droning into the mic about property tax hikes makes Ray’s jaw ache. He’s halfway through his second beer, leaning against a fence post far from the crowd, when he spots her.
Clara Bennett, 52, the mayor’s wife, is wiping flour off her wrist at the dessert table. She’s not wearing the stilettos or frumpy blouses she wears to city council meetings, just a soft blue sundress and scuffed work boots, the same kind Ray bought in bulk when he was still climbing poles. He’d forgotten she baked the peach pies for the roast every year long before she married the blowhard currently yelling about “fiscal responsibility.” He steps forward to grab a slice when she reaches for the same one, their hands brushing. His are crisscrossed with thin scars from decades of handling live wires, calloused at the fingertips, and hers are soft, still dusted with flour, warm where they press against his knuckles.
She laughs, a low, rough sound that cuts through the mayor’s droning. “I made that one extra sweet. Figured someone around here could use a break from all the bitter.” She holds eye contact longer than she should, her gaze flicking from the scar across his left eyebrow to the wedding band on his finger, and Ray’s throat goes dry. He knows he should step back, knows half the town is already staring, knows messing with the mayor’s wife is the kind of drama he’s spent years avoiding. But she’s standing so close he can smell coconut shampoo mixed with charcoal smoke, and when she leans in to mutter the mayor forgot his own speech notes three times that morning, her shoulder brushes his bicep, warm through his thin flannel shirt.
He teases her about the pie’s sugar content, she teases him back about still wearing his wedding ring when everyone in town knows he eats frozen dinners for one every night. They sneak off toward the old utility shed behind the fire station when no one’s looking, the one stuffed full of rotting hoses and rusted crowbars no one’s touched in a decade. She sits on the edge of a dented workbench, her knees brushing his as he leans against the frame next to her, and tells him she caught the mayor cheating on her with his admin eight months prior, that she hadn’t said a word because she didn’t want to tank the election and let the even worse candidate win. She hasn’t told anyone else, she says, not even her mom.
Ray’s chest feels tight, half disgust at the mayor’s audacity, half a sharp, thrumming desire he hasn’t felt since Sue was alive. He tells her about the ice storm last winter, how he’d stopped by her house after his shift to make sure her mom’s space heater worked, how he’d noticed the mayor’s bags were gone from the hall closet then. He tells her about Sue, about how he shut everyone out after she died because he thought it would hurt less than losing someone again. For a minute neither speaks, the only sound crickets chirping outside the shed and the faint roar of the crowd from the main field. He brushes a strand of hair off her face, his thumb grazing the soft skin of her cheek, and she doesn’t pull away, leaning into the touch and pressing her hand over his.
They hear the mayor’s assistant yelling her name from the edge of the field, and she jumps off the workbench, fumbling in her pocket for a scrap of receipt paper scribbled with a phone number. She folds it into his palm, squeezing his hand tight, and tells him she’s filing for divorce first thing Monday morning. He tucks the paper into his flannel’s breast pocket, walks her back to the edge of the crowd before anyone notices they were gone, and stays long enough to finish his slice of pie, sweet enough to make his teeth ache. Later that night, he sits on his front porch, pulls the scrap of paper out of his pocket, runs his thumb over the smudged ink, and dials the number before he can talk himself out of it.
