Dale Rainer, 58, retired high-voltage lineman with 32 years of scaling utility poles across western Oregon under his belt, had dragged himself to the Saturday farmers market only because his 27-year-old daughter had threatened to stop bringing his 3-year-old grandson over for fishing trips if he skipped another “community engagement” now that the last of the county’s COVID gathering restrictions had lifted. He still wore the frayed Seahawks cap he’d had since 2014, the leather work belt studded with old tool marks that cinched his loose flannel shirt, and work boots caked with lake mud from the week prior. His biggest flaw, one he’d never bothered to fix, was that he held grudges longer than he held most relationships; he still hadn’t spoken to his old line crew partner Mike, who’d bailed on Dale’s wife Elaine’s funeral in 2016 to go on a deep-sea fishing trip in Florida, where he’d moved permanently a year later.
He’d been avoiding his daughter’s 4-H goat booth for 20 minutes, cutting through the far aisle of craft and non-profit vendors, when his forearm slammed into a stack of neon cat adoption flyers, sending them skittering across the gravel. The woman holding them yelped, and when he bent to scoop them up, he recognized her immediately: Clara Bennett, Mike’s ex-wife, who he’d not seen since their messy 2011 divorce, when she’d thrown all of Mike’s hunting gear out on the front lawn and lit half of it on fire. Their heads knocked together as they both reached for a flyer stuck under a vendor’s cooler, and Dale caught a whiff of her perfume—jasmine and bright citrus, nothing like the heavy rose scent Elaine had worn every day for 30 years. He flushed, mumbled an apology, and when they stood, he realized she was barely six inches away, her shoulder almost brushing his, no awkward space between them like most people still kept after the last few years of social distancing.
Clara laughed, the sound warm and rough, like she spent half her days yelling across a kennel to get skittish dogs to come close. She had a thick streak of silver in her dark brown braid, a smudge of cat litter on the knee of her worn jeans, and calluses on her fingers when she reached to take the stack of flyers from him, her knuckles brushing his for a beat longer than polite. She didn’t look away when their eyes met, the corners crinkling like she was teasing him without saying a word. “Still wearing that beat-up belt, huh?” she said, nodding at the leather around his waist. “I remember you wearing that when we helped Mike move into that trailer outside town in 2009. You complained the whole time about his terrible taste in couches.”
Dale’s first instinct was to make an excuse and leave. Old crew rules, the ones he’d lived by for 30 years, said you didn’t so much as buy a coffee for your partner’s ex, even if the partner was a piece of garbage who’d cheated on her twice and skipped your wife’s funeral. He felt a sharp twist of guilt, even disgust, at the fact that he’d noticed how her faded rescue t-shirt fit across her shoulders, how the sun caught the gold hoops in her ears, how her laugh made his chest feel lighter than it had in years. He opened his mouth to say he had to go, but she smirked, nodded at the lemonade stand two booths over, and said, “C’mon. I won’t tell Mike we talked if you don’t tell him I fed his old hunting boots to the shelter’s Great Dane puppy after he left. He deserved it, and you know it.”
He found himself sitting on a splintered pine picnic bench 10 minutes later, condensation dripping down the side of his plastic cup of sour, ice-cold lemonade onto his wrist. Clara told him she’d been running the town’s no-kill animal shelter for 8 years, had just secured a $50,000 grant after three months of hosting small outdoor fundraisers now that restrictions were lifted, and was planning to build a new kennel wing for senior dogs by the end of the year. He told her about his grandson, how the kid could already bait his own hook, how he’d caught a 12-inch bass last weekend and carried it around like a trophy for three hours. Mid-sentence, a drop of lemonade rolled down his forearm toward his elbow, and Clara reached over without thinking, swiping it off with her thumb. She paused for half a second, her hand resting on the sun-warmed skin of his arm, before she pulled back, her cheeks pink like she hadn’t meant to do it.
The thrill of that small touch hummed under his skin for the next 15 minutes, the kind of buzz he hadn’t felt since he was 19, sneaking Elaine out of her parents’ house after curfew to drive to the coast. When Clara paused, twisting the edge of a flyer between her fingers, and said she had an extra ticket to the county fair the following weekend, the same old 90s country cover band they’d all seen back when the crew was still together, Dale hesitated. He thought about the crew rules, about how Mike would throw a fit if he found out, about how he’d spent 7 years going home to an empty house, eating frozen dinners, only talking to his hound dog and his grandson when they came to visit. He thought about how Mike hadn’t even sent a card when Elaine died, and he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds good.”
Clara grinned, grabbed a pen from her pocket, scribbled her cell number on the back of a tabby cat adoption flyer, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his flannel, her fingers brushing the hair on his chest through the open collar. He left the market 10 minutes later, a paper bag of ripe peaches slung over his shoulder, the flyer crinkling against his chest, the faint smell of jasmine still clinging to the sleeve of his shirt. He pulled his old Ford F-150 up to the stop sign at the end of the market road, fished the flyer out of his pocket, and stared at her messy, loopy handwriting for 30 seconds before he punched the number into his phone. The line rang once, then twice, and when he heard her warm laugh through the speaker, he smiled, a real, unforced smile, the kind he hadn’t shared with anyone who wasn’t under four feet tall in almost seven years.
