Ray Voss, 58, retired lineman for the Ottawa County electric co-op, has avoided every school board-affiliated event for 12 years, ever since the board voted to pave over the old West Side football field where he set the 1983 100-yard rushing record. His left knee aches from a 2009 fall off a utility pole, he lives alone in the same ranch he bought when he married his high school sweetheart, who passed four years prior from lung cancer, and he spends most of his free time restoring vintage riding mowers in his garage. His buddy Earl dragged him to the small town’s summer street fair anyway, saying the pork tenderloin sandwiches were so big they hung over both sides of the bun, and Ray couldn’t argue with that. He nurses a lukewarm root beer, sweat sticking the hem of his faded 1978 Bob Seger tour shirt to his back, the distant whine of the Ferris wheel mixing with the chatter of kids darting between booths and the carny running the ring toss yelling over the crowd.
He spots the pie booth first, the scent of warm peach and rhubarb cutting through the smell of fried onions and diesel from the food trucks. He’s halfway across the clover-dusted grass when he reads the name tag pinned to the linen shirt of the woman behind the table: Clara Bennett, School Board President. He freezes. He’s ranted about her at least a dozen times over poker at the VFW, called her a pencil-pushing buzzkill who cared more about budget spreadsheets than small town tradition, and he’s never spoken to her face to face. He turns to leave, but a gust of wind picks up, blows a stack of paper plates off the table, and when she reaches to grab them, she knocks a full jar of whipped cream off the edge, right toward his scuffed work boots.
He catches it one handed, years of snatching flying wrench handles mid-air while working live lines paying off. She leans over the booth to grab it, and for a split second he can see the smattering of freckles across her chest, the top button of her soft blue shirt undone, a faint silver scar above her left eyebrow she laughs off when she notices him looking, says she crashed her 10-speed into a ditch when she was 12 and never lived it down. Their hands brush when she takes the jar from him, her skin cool, calloused across the palms, nothing like the soft, unworked hands he’d pictured her having. He tries to mumble a no-problem and bolt, but she pushes a slice of peach pie across the booth, still warm, a dollop of whipped cream melting on top, on the house, she says, for being my first hero of the day.
He sits down on the wobbly folding chair next to the booth against his better judgment. He tells her his name, and her face lights up. She says she just put the motion through last week to name the new concession stand at the replacement football field after his old coach, Coach Hale, who’d also been her gym teacher when she was in high school. Ray had no idea, he’d stopped opening the local paper’s school board section three years prior, too mad to bother reading anything the group did. He takes a bite of the pie, the crust flaky enough to crumble onto his jeans, the peach sweet and tart, picked that morning from the tree in her backyard, she says. She leans in when he talks about Coach Hale’s terrible post-practice motivational speeches, her knee brushing his under the table, her hazel eyes flecked with gold focused solely on him, no checking her phone, no glancing over at passersby, the kind of unbroken attention he hasn’t gotten since his wife died.
He finds himself telling her about the 1968 Cub Cadet he just finished restoring last month, and she gasps, says she has a 1972 John Deere 110 sitting in her barn that she hasn’t been able to get to run for two years, every small engine shop within 20 miles calling it a lost cause. He tells her he can come look at it next Saturday, no charge, and she grins, says she’ll smoke a rack of ribs for him, make her famous mac and cheese with extra sharp cheddar, no weird low-fat garbage. He agrees, even though 24 hours prior he would have told anyone who suggested he spend a Saturday at the school board president’s house that they were out of their mind.
He stays for another two hours, helping her restock pie slices, carrying crates of soda from her pickup when her nephew bails on her, the smell of her lavender perfume mixing with the baked fruit, her shoulder brushing his every time they both reach for a stack of napkins. When the fair closes down at 9, he helps her load the leftover pies into the back of her SUV, and she slips him a whole peach pie for the road, a scrap of notebook paper with her phone number scrawled on it tucked under the tin foil crust. He drives home with the pie on the passenger seat, the sweet scent filling the cab, his knee still buzzing from where she’d bumped it earlier, already making a mental list of tools to bring next Saturday. He pulls into his driveway, grabs the pie from the seat, and tucks the folded scrap of paper into the breast pocket of his work flannel, patting it twice to make sure it doesn’t fall out before he calls her first thing tomorrow.
