Rudy Voss, 62, retired first-class lineman for Auglaize County Electric, has spent the last eight years perfecting the art of disappearing in plain sight. He shows up to mandatory family functions, drops his grandkids off at soccer practice, and stops at the hardware store every Saturday morning for a single can of WD-40 he doesn’t need, but he never lingers. Grief, he’s found, is easier to carry when you don’t let anyone get close enough to point out how heavy it is. The scar snaking across his left forearm, earned when a downed power line whipped into him during the 2017 tornado outbreak, is the only visible marker of the mess he keeps locked up tight under his worn Carhartt and scuffed work boots.
He only agreed to come to the annual Wapakoneta Fire Department Pig Roast because his 10-year-old grandson was marching in the junior firefighter parade. He’s perched on the end of a splintered pine picnic bench, sweating through his t-shirt in the 86-degree heat, a lukewarm can of Bud Light sweating in his calloused palm, when she sits down next to him. The bench shifts under her weight, their knees brushing for half a second before she pulls back, and he catches a whiff of lavender hand lotion mixed with the sourdough yeast she’s always covered in, sharp and sweet under the pervasive smell of hickory smoke and charred pork.
Clara Bennett, 48, runs the Main Street bakery everyone in town drives 20 minutes out of the way for. He’s known her for 25 years, since she was a lanky 23-year-old crashing his late wife Jan’s Fourth of July cookouts, covered in flour and complaining about her deadbeat boyfriend. For the last decade, the town gossip mill has written her off as permanently single, the kind of woman who’d rather bake sourdough at 4 a.m. than waste time on dates, and he’d never allowed himself to look at her as anything more than Jan’s quirky acquaintance. It feels like a violation, almost, to notice the silver streaks threading through her auburn ponytail, the freckles scattered across her knuckles, the way her flannel sleeves are rolled up to show a tiny tattoo of a peach on her wrist.
She sets a dented Tupperware container on the bench between them, pops the lid, and the smell of warm peach cobbler hits him so hard he has to blink. “Saw you skip the dessert line,” she says, passing him a plastic fork, her fingers brushing his when he takes it. “Know you hate standing around with the crowd, listening to everyone ask how you’re doing.” He stares at her, surprised. He’d thought he was better at hiding his habits than that. He takes a bite, the crust buttery and the peaches sweet enough to make his teeth ache, and realizes it’s the first thing he’s eaten all day that didn’t come out of a microwave.
The first flicker of guilt hits him then, hot and sharp. He shoves it down, tells himself he’s just being polite, but he can’t stop staring at the way her mouth tugs up at the corner when she laughs at a group of drunk firefighters falling off a hay bale. For 8 years, he’s told himself any joy that doesn’t involve Jan’s memory is a betrayal, that letting anyone else get close would make the 34 years they had mean less. The disgust he feels at himself for wanting to lean closer, to hear what she sounds like when she whispers, sits heavy in his chest next to the cobbler.
He makes an excuse to leave, starts to stand, but she puts a hand on his forearm, right over the scar, and he freezes. Her palm is warm through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. “Jan told me, two weeks before she died,” she says, soft enough that no one else can hear, the sound of the country band playing in the background fading to a hum. “She said if I didn’t kick your ass out of that garage of yours and make you stop hiding, she’d come back and haunt both of us. Said you’d be too stubborn to do it on your own.”
The words knock the wind out of him. He sits back down, slow, and doesn’t pull his arm away. The sun starts to set, painting the cornfields across the road pink and orange, and the crowd thins out, most people piling into their trucks to head home before the mosquitoes come out. She’s telling him about the time a customer came into the bakery last week demanding a cake shaped like a riding lawnmower for his 70th birthday, when she stops mid-sentence, leans in, and wipes a smudge of barbecue sauce off his chin with her thumb. The pad of her thumb brushes his lower lip for half a second, and he doesn’t flinch.
He tells her he’s been avoiding her for months, because every time they ran into each other at the grocery store, Mrs. Henderson from the church would stare at them like they were doing something dirty in the cereal aisle, and he hated the idea of people thinking he was replacing Jan. She snorts, takes a bite of cobbler, and says she’s been avoiding him for the exact same reason, plus she thought he still saw her as the dumb kid who got drunk at his 50th birthday party and threw up in his flower bed.
They sit there until the last of the picnic lights turn on, until the fire department starts dousing the pig pit with water. He offers to walk her to her truck, a beat-up 2008 Ford F150 with a “Bake My Day” sticker on the back window, and their hands brush three times on the short walk across the gravel parking lot. When they get to her door, he leans against the side of the truck, and asks her if she wants to go fishing with him next Saturday at the reservoir he’s been going to since he was a kid. He tells her he’s got an old boat that runs most of the time, and the crappie are biting this time of year.
She grins, throws her Tupperware in the passenger seat, and says yes, adds that she’ll bring extra cobbler, no raisins, because she remembers he hates raisins. She leans in to hug him, and he can feel the warmth of her through her flannel shirt, the soft press of her shoulder against his chest, before she pulls back and climbs into the truck. He stands in the parking lot long after her taillights fade over the county line, the faint taste of peach on his lower lip and the first light, unguarded smile he’s had in years tugging at the corner of his mouth.
