Ray Voss, 58, retired power lineman with 32 years on the job in western Michigan’s small Lowell community, leans against the splintered wooden bench of the homecoming festival’s pop-up beer garden, scuffed steel-toe boots propped on the lower rail, cold Miller Lite in one hand. A thin white scar cuts across his left bicep from a 2019 line fire, a souvenir he’s proud of, and his worst flaw is he refuses to let go of a grudge even when it rots in his chest. For three years he boycotted the homecoming parade after the school board shifted the route off Front Street, the spot where he kissed his wife Lois for the first time after the 1987 parade, where they sat every year until she died of ovarian cancer four years prior. He only showed up this year because the local paper announced the route was back, and he hauled her faded daisy-print folding chair out of his garage at 7 a.m. to stake his spot.
The bench fills up fast, the air thick with the smell of smoked sausage, cinnamon-dusted apple cider donuts, and wood smoke curling from the fire pits strung along the sidewalk. He’s halfway through his second beer when someone drops onto the empty spot next to him, their shoulder brushing his hard enough to slosh a little beer over the rim of his can. He’s ready to snap until he turns his head and recognizes Clara Bennett, 54, the school board president he screamed at over Zoom three years back when they voted to move the route. He tenses up, ready to stand and leave, but the rest of the bench is packed with parents and teens yelling at the passing varsity football players, and he can’t squeeze out without knocking three people over.
She orders a spiked hard cider from the passing bartender, and he can smell lavender hand cream over the hops and cinnamon hanging in the cool October air. She laughs at a kid darting by yelling about a giant candy apple, and her knee brushes his under the bench, warm even through his thick Carhartt work pants. “I know you’re mad at me,” she says without looking at him first, twisting the cap off her cider, and he blinks, surprised she even recognizes him. “I got 127 angry emails the week we voted to move the route. Yours was the only one that included a photo of your wife’s chair.” He stares at her, his throat tight, he’d forgotten he’d attached that photo when he fired off the email at 2 a.m. after one too many beers.
She explains the board moved the route because the old Front Street sidewalks were crumbling, the city refused to fund repairs until the board proved the foot traffic justified it, so she spent two years lobbying the city council, organizing fundraisers at the high school, even selling her own heirloom tomato plants at the farmers market to cover half the repaving cost. He’d had no idea. He’d just assumed she was another out-of-touch bureaucrat who didn’t care about the town’s old traditions. She leans in when she talks, her face close enough he can see the faint silver strands woven through her dark brown hair, the smudge of cinnamon sugar on her left cheek, and she holds eye contact like she’s actually listening when he talks about Lois, about how he carried her home on his back that 1987 parade night after she drank too much spiked cider.
She reaches for a stack of napkins on the table between them, and her hand knocks over his half-empty beer, the cold liquid soaking into the sleeve of his Carhartt. She swears, grabs a wet wipe from her purse, and dabs at the wet fabric, her fingers brushing his forearm for half a second, and he feels a jolt go up his spine, the kind he hasn’t felt since the first time Lois kissed him. Her hands have calluses too, he notices, rough along the pads of her fingers, from gardening, she says, she grows 17 different varieties of tomatoes in her backyard, her husband left her five years ago, so gardening’s been her only consistent hobby since.
The beer garden closes at 10, the string lights turned off one by one, the crowd thinning out, a light drizzle starting to fall, cold enough that he can see his breath in the air. He walks her to the public parking lot, she’s wearing a thin wool coat that’s not nearly warm enough, so he grabs the old plaid flannel he keeps rolled behind the seat of his beat-up 2006 F-150 and hands it to her. She puts it on, it’s too big, the sleeves falling past her wrists, and she stands close to him when he locks the truck bed, her hand resting lightly on his chest for a second, right over the faded logo of his old lineman’s union shirt under his jacket. She says she’s been wanting to talk to him for months, would see him at the diner every Saturday morning eating blueberry pancakes by himself, was too scared he’d yell at her to approach.
She pulls a small glass jar of pickled tomatoes out of her tote bag, presses it into his hand, the glass still a little warm from being tucked next to her thermos of hot tea. They agree to meet at his regular bar on Front Street next Friday at 7 p.m., she says she’ll bring the rest of her pickled vegetable batch if he brings the photo album of him and Lois at the parades over the years. He watches her walk to her beat-up Subaru, the too-long flannel sleeves flapping in the wind, and he tucks the jar into the inside pocket of his jacket, close to his chest. He kicks a crumpled red candy apple wrapper across the wet asphalt, the faint sound of the high school marching band’s final practice still echoing from down the street.
