Rudy Marquez, 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, has spent the last 8 years clinging so tightly to his routine he’s shut out every chance at new connection, convinced letting anyone in would be a betrayal of his late wife Karen, who died of ovarian cancer in 2015. He only showed up to the town’s annual summer beer garden tonight because his 11-year-old granddaughter Lila begged him to be in the audience for her first pie baking contest entry. She won second place, left an hour ago with his daughter to go to a sleepover, so he’s been parked at a splintered pine picnic table ever since, nursing a cold Spotted Cow, sawdust still caked in the cuff of his worn Carhartt jeans from patching a broken bleacher before the event started.
The air smells like charred bratwurst, cut grass, and the sweet, sticky perfume of the cherry trees lining the park perimeter. String lights crisscross over the picnic area, fireflies blink low to the ground near the port-a-potties. All the other tables are packed when she slides onto the bench across from him, balancing a paper plate of peach pie and a glass of hard seltzer in one hand, a canvas tote slung over her shoulder emblazoned with the town library logo. Her strappy leather sandal brushes the toe of his work boot when she tucks her legs under the table, and she mumbles an apology, eyes crinkling at the corners when he waves it off.
He’s ready to go back to staring at his beer and ignoring everyone, but she nods at the blue jay woodcarving hanging off his keychain, peeking out of his jeans pocket. “I’ve seen that design before,” she says. “You did the little bird carvings on all the new playground equipment by the elementary school, right?” He blinks, surprised no one’s ever commented on that besides Lila. He nods, tells her he carved each one for the kids who helped assemble the playset last spring. She introduces herself as Clara, the new part-time librarian who moved to town in January after her ex-husband moved to Florida with his secretary. She’s 54, has freckles across her nose that stand out under the string lights, chipped sage green nail polish from re-staining the library’s back porch last weekend, smells like lavender hand cream and the lemon polish she uses on the library’s old oak tables.
He finds himself talking more than he has to anyone besides Lila in months, telling her the story about how Karen used to drag him to this exact beer garden every year, how she’d enter the pie contest every single time and lose to the same lady from the south side of town who put bourbon in her peach filling. He’s halfway through a story about how Karen once snuck a flask of bourbon into the contest to try and beat her when he stops short, chest tight, like he’s broken some unspoken rule by talking about her to a stranger who’s making his palms sweat. He almost makes an excuse to leave, but then Clara laughs, a low, warm sound, and says her mom used to do the exact same thing at the county fair back in Iowa. The corner of her knee brushes his under the table when she leans forward to take a bite of pie, and he doesn’t move away. He’s fighting it, half of him disgusted that he’s even enjoying talking to her, like he’s cheating on Karen even though she’s been gone 8 years, the other half hungry for the way she holds eye contact when he talks, like she’s actually listening instead of just waiting for her turn to speak. She swipes a crumb of pie off the edge of his flannel shirt when it falls off her plate, her fingers brushing the soft fabric over his forearm, and he feels a jolt go up his spine he hasn’t felt since he was 17 and kissed Karen for the first time behind the high school gym.
She tells him she’s been trying to fix a 1972 oak card catalog that was donated to the library a month prior, the drawers stuck, the wood warped, no one in town has been able to tell her if it’s salvageable. She asks if he’d be willing to come take a look at it tomorrow afternoon, offers him the rest of her peach pie as a down payment, plus a whole one of his own if he can fix it. He’s already opening his mouth to say no, to tell her he’s too busy fixing the rec league soccer bleachers, that he doesn’t do side work for anyone, when he remembers the last thing Karen said to him in the hospital, told him not to spend the rest of his life being lonely just because she wasn’t there anymore. He looks at Clara, the way her hair falls over her shoulder when she tucks a strand behind her ear, the little smudge of pie filling on her chin, and he says yes.
They exchange numbers, she types her contact info into his beat up old iPhone, her thumb brushing his when she hands it back. She says she’s got to go, her rescue pit bull is home alone waiting for her dinner, and she waves over her shoulder when she walks toward her beat up silver Ford Ranger parked by the park entrance. He sits there for another 20 minutes, finishing his beer, eating the last of the peach pie she left on the plate between them, sweet and buttery with just a hint of bourbon that makes him smile. When he gets in his own truck 10 minutes later, he pulls up her contact info, adds a little doodle of a book next to her name before he hits save, then turns the key in the ignition, the radio playing an old Johnny Cash track Karen used to blast on road trips, and pulls out of the parking lot.
