He spotted her when she was yelling at a kid who’d climbed on the park’s old oak tree to grab a frisbee stuck in the branches. Lila Marlow, 32, the new HOA president, the woman who’d sent him three passive aggressive emails in the last two months about parking his side-job work truck on the street overnight, the stepdaughter of the old HOA head who’d made him take down his late wife’s 17 wind chimes off his front porch three years prior, the last thing he had of hers that made noise when the wind blew. Cole had already drafted a half-scathing reply to her last email in his head, planned to send it first thing Monday morning, until she walked straight over to him, no neon vest, just a faded Fleetwood Mac t-shirt and cut off jean shorts and scuffed white sneakers, a smudge of charcoal on her left wrist from running the kids’ craft table an hour earlier.
She leaned over the picnic table to grab a stack of napkins next to his beer, her hip brushing his denim-covered knee, and he could feel the heat of her skin through the thin fabric, sharp and unexpected. “I know you’re mad about the truck rule,” she said, not wasting time on small talk, her voice lower than he expected, rough like she’d spent the whole day yelling over the band. She didn’t look away when he glared at her, dark brown eyes steady, a tiny smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth like she knew he was two seconds from telling her to go to hell. “I tried to get the board to roll it back last week. The old crew made that rule because your old HOA head hated that your truck was nicer than his fancy Lexus. I voted against it. Lost by one.”
Cole blinked, the snappy reply he’d rehearsed dying in his throat. He’d spent three years painting every HOA member with the same brush, assumed they were all bored, power-hungry losers with nothing better to do than nitpick people’s lawns and porches. She smelled like citrus and cedar, not the cloying flowery perfume his wife used to wear, and when she laughed at his joke about the old HOA head’s terrible, patchy lawn, her arm brushed his bicep, and he could feel the rough callus on the side of her wrist, same as the ones he had from decades of climbing utility poles. She told him she taught art at the local elementary school, took the HOA job because no one else would, had spent the first three months in the role undoing all her stepdad’s stupid rules, including the wind chime ban, which she’d gotten reversed two weeks prior. She’d seen his wind chimes hanging in his workshop when she dropped off the truck notice, she said, the little glass ones his wife had blown herself, and they looked just like the ones her mom used to make before she died.
They didn’t dance close, didn’t sway pressed together like the teen couples a few feet away, but their fingers stayed laced the whole song, and when she stepped a little too close to avoid a kid running by with a snow cone, her shoulder pressed to his chest, and he could hear her laugh over the music, bright and easy. When the song ended, she didn’t let go of his hand right away, just looked up at him, her cheeks pink from the heat, and said she had a box of half-finished wind chime parts her mom left her, sitting in her garage collecting dust, and she didn’t have the first clue how to put them together.
Cole pulled his old flip phone out of his pocket, the dented one he refused to replace because it still worked fine, and dictated his number to her, watching her type it into her iPhone, her thumb brushing his when she passed the device over for him to double check. He told her to stop by his place tomorrow around two, he’d pull out the wind chimes he’d been storing in his workshop, show her how to string the glass pieces so they didn’t clink too hard in strong wind. She smiled, tucked her phone into her back pocket, and nodded, saying she’d bring the cold vanilla iced coffee he’d mentioned liking when they talked about his early morning side jobs restringing lines for local farms.
He watched her walk back over to the craft table, waving at a group of little kids who were yelling her name, and took a slow sip of his now-warm beer. The old guys from the VFW yelled a teasing joke across the picnic area, and he flipped them off, grinning, as a soft gust of wind carried the faint sound of a wind chime from a house two blocks over.
