Clay Bennett, 58, retired high school woodshop teacher, had been dragged to the neighborhood’s first post-pandemic block party against his better judgment. He’d spent seven years holed up in his ranch house after his wife Ellie died of ovarian cancer, only leaving to grab groceries or work on custom furniture orders in his garage, and the last three years of lockdowns had only made his hermit tendencies worse. His biggest flaw, as his next door neighbor repeatedly reminded him, was that he’d rather rot alone than risk looking like a sad old widower trolling for dates at community events. The August humidity clung to the back of his worn Carhartt shirt, and he leaned against an oak tree sipping a lukewarm Pabst, ignoring the shouts from the cornhole tournament 20 feet away. The air smelled like charred bratwurst, citronella candles, and the faint, sticky sweetness of shaved ice being served from a cart at the end of the park strip. A cover band slurred through a 1992 Alan Jackson track, the tinny speakers warbling at the high notes.
He spotted her first when she walked away from the grill, wiping her hands on the leg of her cutoff jeans. Mara Hale, Ellie’s baby sister, 52, who he hadn’t seen since the funeral, when she’d hugged him tight and slipped a note with her Portland phone number into his pocket that he’d never called. She had the same auburn hair as Ellie, streaked through with silver now, pulled half back with a frayed scrunchie, and a smudge of charcoal on her left cheek. She caught him staring, and a slow grin spread across her face before she wove through the crowd toward him.
She stopped so close he could smell coconut sunscreen and the faint burn of bourbon from the spiked lemonade everyone was drinking. Her eyes, the same hazel as Ellie’s, didn’t leave his even when a kid darted past her, nearly knocking her into his chest. “You still wear that ratty Carhartt everywhere?” she said, nodding at the frayed cuff on his left arm, the one that had gotten caught in a table saw three years prior, leaving a thin, silvery scar snaking up his forearm. When she reached out to tap the scar with her index finger, her knuckles brushed his wrist, and he flinched, not from pain, but from the sharp, warm jolt that shot up his arm straight to his chest. He told himself it was wrong, that he was betraying Ellie even looking at Mara like that, that the neighbors who’d known them for 20 years were definitely watching, that this was exactly the kind of messy drama he’d spent seven years avoiding. The disgust curdled in his stomach for half a second before it melted into something softer, something he hadn’t felt since before Ellie got sick: curiosity.
He teased her back about the gap between her two front teeth, the one she’d always been self-conscious about as a teen, and she laughed, leaning in so her elbow grazed his bicep. She’d moved back to town two months prior to take over as head librarian at the local branch, she said, and had asked around about him, but everyone told her he never left his house. When someone yelled her name from the grill, she didn’t even glance over, her gaze locked on his, her bottom lip tucked between her teeth the way it always was when she was nervous. He found himself leaning in too, the noise of the party fading into a distant hum, his chest tight with a mix of guilt and giddiness he couldn’t name.
She nodded toward the gravel path leading down to the creek at the edge of the neighborhood. “Wanna get away from all this?” she said, and he hesitated for ten long seconds, thinking about the stack of unopened mail on his kitchen counter, the half-finished Adirondack chair in his garage, the framed photo of Ellie on his nightstand. He almost said no, almost made up an excuse about a headache, almost walked straight back to his house and locked the door like he always did. Then she shifted her weight, and her hand brushed his again, and he nodded.
The sound of the band faded as they walked down the path, the only noise the crunch of gravel under their work boots and the chirp of crickets in the underbrush. She stopped at the old wooden footbridge that crossed the creek, leaning against the rail, and turned to him. “Ellie knew I had a crush on you when I was 17,” she said, and he froze, his breath catching in his throat. “She told me, right before she died, that if I ever moved back to town, I had to make sure you didn’t turn into a hermit. Said you were too stubborn to ask for company on your own.”
The last of his resistance snapped right then, the guilt he’d been carrying since he first saw her melting away. He reached up to wipe the charcoal smudge off her cheek, his thumb lingering on the soft skin of her jaw, and she tilted her head into his hand, her eyes fluttering shut for half a second. He didn’t say anything, didn’t make any big grand declaration, because he didn’t need to. She laced her fingers through his, her palm calloused from years of reshelving hardcovers, his rough from 30 years of running saws and sanding lumber, and they stood there for a long minute, watching the creek ripple over the smooth stones underneath the bridge.
When they started walking back toward the party, they moved slow, no hurry, their joined hands swinging between them. A neighbor who’d been at Ellie’s funeral waved from the edge of the path, and Clay lifted their joined hands in a lazy greeting, not a single flicker of hesitation in his chest.
