He’s halfway through making a mental list of repairs he wants to tweak on the truck before fall when a shadow falls over his beer. He looks up, and there’s Clara Bennett, 47, his ex-wife’s first cousin, the one who moved back to town last year to open a dog grooming shop on Main Street. He’s avoided her for 12 months on principle, ever since she’d waved at him from the shop window and he’d crossed the street to pretend he hadn’t seen her. The rule he’d made the day his ex left with that traveling insurance salesman was simple: no contact with anyone from her side of the family, no exceptions, no loopholes. She’s in cutoff jean shorts cuffed at the hem, a faded Merle Haggard tee stretched across her shoulders, steel-toe work boots still dusted with dog fur, holding a sweating cup of pink lemonade. She nods at the truck, parked on the side street 20 feet away, and yells over the band that it’s the nicest vehicle at the show, that the Corvette guy looked like he’d never even changed his own oil.
He snorts before he can stop himself. She steps closer, her bare shoulder brushing his bicep when she leans in to hear his response, and he catches a whiff of coconut shampoo and lemon polish, the same scent he remembers from his wedding 32 years prior, when she was 15 and had snuck a beer from the cooler before the reception even started. She laughs when he complains about the Corvette owner bragging about paying a shop $60k to restore the car for him, and the sound is rough, a little smoky, like she’s smoked a pack a day for 20 years. She reaches up to wipe a smudge of powdered sugar from his cheek, her thumb calloused from scissoring dog fur for hours a day, and he flinches, not from the touch, but from how warm her skin is, how he hasn’t let anyone that close since his ex left.
He should leave. He knows he should. Half his chest is tight with that old familiar disgust, the same feeling he gets when he runs into his ex’s sister at the grocery store, the anger that’s lived under his skin for 12 years humming to the surface. But the other half of him is light, curious, like he’s 19 again and sneaking out after his shift to drive around the back roads with a girl he liked. She mentions she left her ex-husband three years ago, that he was a mean drunk who hated her dogs and hated that she worked 60 hours a week, that she didn’t say hi when she moved back because she knew he wanted nothing to do with her family. She says she’s had a crush on him since she was a teenager, that she’d told her cousin a hundred times she was an idiot for leaving a guy who’d fix her car for free and bring her coffee in bed every morning.
They walk over to his truck when the band switches to a terrible pop cover, and he lowers the tailgate for them to sit on. The crowd noise fades the further they get from the fairgrounds, fireflies blinking low over the cornfield across the street, the air cooling enough that he shivers a little when the wind picks up. He offers her a sip of his beer, and she takes it, their fingers brushing when she passes the cup back, her knee pressed to his the whole time they’re sitting. He doesn’t say anything for a long minute, warring with the rule he’s lived by for over a decade, the voice in his head screaming that this is wrong, that the whole town will talk, that he’s setting himself up to get hurt again. Then he reaches over, tucks a strand of blonde hair that fell in her face behind her ear, his thumb brushing her cheekbone, and she doesn’t pull away.
They sit there for another hour, talking about the three golden retrievers she fosters, his two grandkids that live two hours away, the time he’d climbed a 40 foot pole in a thunderstorm to fix a transformer so the whole neighborhood wouldn’t lose power during a high school football game. When the fair lights start flickering off one by one, he asks her if she wants to get pancakes at the 24 hour diner off the highway, the one that makes blueberry pancakes so fluffy they melt in your mouth. She nods, grinning so wide the dimples in her cheeks show, and hops off the tailgate. He unlocks the passenger door for her, and when she climbs in, her hand rests on his forearm for half a second before she pulls away to buckle her seatbelt. He turns the key, the truck rumbling to life so loud the windows rattle, the old country radio station cutting on mid-way through a George Strait song. He pulls out onto the dark road, not thinking about his ex, not thinking about the stupid rules he made 12 years prior, just the sound of her humming along to the song, and the faint smell of coconut still clinging to the air inside the cab.
