Clay Bennett, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service firefighter, has a rule: no drama. He spent 32 years chasing wildfires across 11 western states, lost his wife Ellie to ovarian cancer seven years back, and moved home to Millersburg, Ohio, last spring to help his sister run her craft beer bar, The Pine Tap, after her knee replacement. His biggest flaw? He’s spent the better part of a decade convincing himself any joy not tied to Ellie’s memory is a betrayal, so he’s turned down every set-up, every casual advance, every invitation that didn’t involve bar work or mowing his sister’s lawn.
Mid-August in small-town Ohio is thick enough to chew. The humidity clings to the back of your neck, sticks your tee to your ribs, turns the farmers market blacktop into a soft, tarry mess. Clay’s manning The Pine Tap’s sample booth that Saturday, pouring 1-ounce tastes of their new peach wheat ale, when the woman running the candle booth next to him leans over the shared folding table to grab a sample. Her sun-warmed forearm brushes his, and he catches a whiff of jasmine lotion and cut grass, the faint, sweet scent of the soy candles she’s selling stacked behind her. She’s Mara, 54, the new town librarian, he learns, moved from Portland six months prior, just finalized her divorce from Roger Hale, the town’s mayor and Clay’s old high school football teammate. Roger’s been running his mouth around town for weeks, calling any man who so much as holds a door for her a “homewrecker,” which is exactly the kind of small-town nonsense Clay’s spent his whole life avoiding.
He keeps his distance at first. Nods when she brings him a lavender candle as a thank you for the free ale, grunts when she teases him about wearing the same faded fire department tee three Saturdays in a row. But she keeps showing up at The Pine Tap on weekday nights, sitting at the far end of the bar, reading old western novels, sipping peach wheat, only leaving when last call hits. She asks him about the thick, silvery scar snaking up his left bicep, from a 2017 blaze outside Bend, Oregon, when a falling cedar branch clipped him as he was pulling a rookie out of the fire line. When he rolls his sleeve up to show her, her fingers brush the raised, rough edge of the scar, and he feels a jolt shoot up his arm, the kind of spark he hasn’t felt since Ellie was alive.
The conflict nags at him for weeks. He tells himself he’s being stupid, that he’s too old for this kind of mess, that messing with the mayor’s ex will turn him into the talk of the town, that he’s betraying Ellie’s memory by even looking at another woman. He avoids the farmers market the next Saturday, tells his sister he’s got a lawn to mow, spends the whole day pacing his small rental house, staring at the photo of Ellie on his kitchen counter. But when he gets to the bar that night, Mara’s sitting in her usual spot, holding a cold peach wheat for him, and she doesn’t even mention him ditching the market. She just asks him to tell her more about the time he got stuck in a snowstorm on a mountain in Idaho for three days with nothing but a bag of jerky and a portable radio.
The climax hits on a rainy Saturday in early September. The bar closed an hour prior, all the regulars have headed home, the jukebox is playing Johnny Cash’s *American Recordings* on low, rain is tapping hard against the tin roof. Mara’s the only one left, sitting at the bar, her rain boots propped up on the next stool, her hair damp from the walk over, wearing a faded Tom Petty tee that’s frayed at the cuffs. She leans in across the bar, her elbows on the worn oak, and holds his eye contact for three full beats, longer than any polite conversation calls for. “I know Roger’s running his mouth,” she says, her voice low enough that only he can hear it over the rain. “I know you don’t want drama. But I haven’t stopped thinking about that day at the market, when our arms brushed. Have you?”
Clay freezes for two full seconds, every part of him screaming to say no, to tell her he’s not that guy, to walk into the back office and lock the door. But then he looks at her, at the crinkles around her hazel eyes, at the smudge of candle wax on her left wrist, and he can’t lie. He walks around the bar, stops two inches from her, close enough that he can smell that same jasmine lotion he smelled that first day at the market, and brushes a strand of wet hair off her forehead. His thumb brushes her cheek, and she leans into the touch, her hand coming up to rest on his chest, right over his heart, which is beating so hard he’s half convinced she can feel it through his flannel. He kisses her then, slow, the taste of peach ale and peppermint gum on her lips, the sound of Cash singing “Hurt” in the background, the rain hammering the roof so loud it drowns out every other thought in his head, every worry about the town gossip, every guilt he’s carried around for seven years.
They grab their jackets off the hook by the door, and he drives her to her small cottage on the edge of town, the rain slamming against the windshield, the wipers working double time. He walks her up the porch steps, his hand tangled in hers, and she holds the screen door open for him, a small smile on her face. He kicks his scuffed work boots off by her front porch mat, his hand still tangled in hers, as the screen door clicks shut behind them.
