Clay Bennett, 58, retired power lineman with a scar slashing across his left eyebrow from a 2017 ice storm and a habit of turning down every blind date his family shoves his way, leans against a splintered pine picnic table at the annual Maplewood Fire Department fundraiser, twisting a half-warm IPA in his calloused hands. He’d spent the morning patching the split rail fence around his property, and the sun has burned a faint pink stripe across the back of his neck, his frayed work jeans stiff with sawdust. His cousin has been hovering for 20 minutes, muttering about the new librarian who’s “single and loves fishing,” and Clay is this close to lying and saying he’s got a calf to feed just to escape.
He’s scanning the crowd for an exit when Mara Carter steps into his line of sight, holding two spiked seltzers dripping with condensation, a smudge of charcoal streaked across her left forearm from manning the bratwurst grill for the past three hours. She’s 52, fresh off a divorce from a tech exec in Austin who’d cheated on her with a 28-year-old marketing coordinator, and she’s been back in town for three weeks, though Clay has deliberately avoided running into her, mostly because she’s Linda’s oldest friend, and seeing her always makes the back of his throat tight with the ghost of his wife’s laugh. She drops into the empty bench next to him, close enough that her bare, sun-warmed calf brushes his through the thin denim of his jeans, and shoves one of the seltzers into his free hand. “Line for beer’s 15 deep,” she says, nodding at the bar tent 30 feet away. “Figured you’d rather this than stand around making small talk with the volunteer firefighters who still call you ‘the guy who climbed the pole in the middle of the 2020 wildfire.’”
Then she goes quiet, swirling the seltzer in her can, and when she looks up at him, her dark eyes hold his so steady he has to fight the urge to glance away. “I had a crush on you when I was 20,” she says, so quiet he almost misses it over the sound of the band launching into *Folsom Prison Blues*. Clay freezes, his hand halfway to his mouth. His first thought is that this is wrong, that he’s betraying Linda, that he should stand up and walk away right now. He feels a sharp twist of guilt in his gut, mixed with a hot, faint spark of something he hasn’t felt in four years, something that makes his face heat up like a kid getting caught passing notes in class. He opens his mouth to say something, anything, but she cuts him off, leaning in a little closer, her elbow brushing his bicep, soft through the thin cotton of his flannel shirt. “Linda knew,” she says, and her voice is soft, no teasing left in it. “She used to joke that if anything ever happened to her, I was the only person stubborn enough to kick your ass out of that big empty house of yours. Said you’d turn into a hermit who eats canned chili for every meal if someone didn’t make you.”
Clay blinks, and suddenly he’s back in Linda’s hospital room, 2019, her hair thin from chemo, laughing as she held his hand and told him he didn’t have to be alone forever. He’d brushed it off then, told her to stop talking like that, but now, sitting next to Mara, he feels the tight knot he’s been carrying in his chest for four years start to loosen. He looks at her, at the faint crinkles around her eyes when she smiles, at the chipped pale blue nail polish on her fingers, the same shade Linda used to wear every summer, and he realizes he’s been thinking about her too, for months. Thinking about the Christmas cards she sent every year, long after most people stopped checking in, thinking about how she’d sat with him for three hours after Linda’s funeral, not saying a word, just handing him beer after beer.
She reaches across the table to grab a crumpled napkin to wipe the charcoal off her arm, and her hand brushes his, her skin soft against the rough calluses on his knuckles. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away, just lets his hand rest there, for a second, while the crowd around them yells along to the song, while a group of kids runs past screaming, chasing a golden retriever with a piece of bratwurst in its mouth. “I got a place on the west side,” she says, pulling her hand back slowly, like she’s afraid she’ll scare him off. “Fixed the porch up last week. Was gonna get tacos from that 24-hour place on Oak Street after this, the one we used to go to after Linda’s birthday parties. You wanna come?”
Clay nods, standing up so fast his knee slams into the bottom of the picnic table, sloshing seltzer down the front of his jeans. Mara laughs, loud and bright, and stands up too, slipping her hand into his, her palm warm and calloused from hiking and painting and all the things she’s done in the years they’ve been apart. They walk past his cousin, who wags his eyebrows and grins, and Clay flips him off, grinning back, for the first time in months he doesn’t care who sees. The sun is dipping below the oak trees, painting the sky pink and tangerine, the sound of the band fading behind them as they walk toward the parking lot, the air cool on his sunburned neck. He hasn’t felt this light in years, like he’s been holding his breath for four years and finally let it out, like he doesn’t have to be the strong, stoic widower everyone expects him to be anymore. He squeezes her hand a little tighter, and when she glances up at him, he doesn’t look away.
