Clay Bennett is 58, retired power lineman, 12 screws in his left knee from a 2017 pole fall, and he’s held a grudge against Maren Hale for 731 days straight. He’d only shown up to the town’s summer block party because his old line crew buddy begged him, said the fried pickle truck was still running the same recipe they’d been using since the 90s, and Clay’s cooler of Pabst was getting warm on his porch. The air hums with cicadas so loud they rattle the fillings in his back teeth, the asphalt under his scuffed work boots still holds the day’s heat, and he’s leaned against an ancient oak at the edge of the food truck row, halfway through his second beer, when she slams into his line of sight.
She’s carrying a stack of plastic lemonade cups, one hand balancing a paper plate of corn dogs, and she trips over a half-buried oak root before she can step around him. Half a cup of ice-cold lemonade sloshes over the rim, hits his bare forearm, runs sticky down to his wrist before he can react. She yelps, sets the stack down on a nearby picnic table, grabs a crumpled napkin from her back pocket, and dabs at the mess before he can tell her not to bother. Her hand is warm, calloused at the fingertips, her nails short and unpolished, and the faint smell of lavender hand cream cuts through the fried food and charcoal smoke hanging in the air. He recognizes her immediately from the town Facebook page clips of school board meetings, where she wore a frumpy navy blazer and announced the vote to rebrand the old county fair he’d run for 22 years.
Clay’s jaw tightens, ready to snap the first snarky comment he’s been rehearsing for two years, but she laughs first, a low, rough sound that doesn’t match the polished board persona he’d memorized. “I swear I haven’t gone a full day this week without tripping over something,” she says, nodding at the lemonade dripping off his elbow. “Let me buy you a beer to make up for it. The craft truck has that root beer ale you like, right?” He blinks, confused, and she smirks. “I asked Jerry at the hardware store. Tried to call you three times last year to talk about the fair, you never picked up.”
The grudge he’s carried like a 50-pound tool belt for two years suddenly feels heavy, stupid. He nods, and she walks to the beer truck, her jeans faded at the knees, a vintage Neil Young tour tee tucked into the waistband, not the blazer he’d pictured her in 100 times. When she comes back, she leans against the oak next to him, their shoulders six inches apart at first, then three, when she leans in to hear him over the band starting up at the stage. She admits she didn’t want to rebrand the fair, but the state grant that kept it from shutting down entirely required youth programming add-ons, and she’d been fighting to keep his old lineman safety showcase in the lineup the whole time. He tells her about the 2019 fair, when a squirrel chewed through a temporary power line mid-parade, and he’d climbed the light pole in his cowboy boots to fix it before the fireworks started, and she laughs so hard her shoulder brushes his, warm through the thin flannel of his shirt.
He’s aware of every tiny point of contact, every time her knee grazes his when she shifts her weight, every time she tilts her head and her hazel eyes lock on his like he’s the only person in the crowd worth listening to. He’d spent two years thinking she was a stuck-up, out-of-touch bureaucrat who’d erased his life’s work for a grant check, and now he’s fighting a pull so strong he can barely focus on his beer. Disgust warms into curiosity, then something sharper, hotter, when she tucks a stray strand of brown hair streaked with gold behind her ear and says she’s been solo since her divorce four years prior, spends most weekends throwing pots in her garage studio.
The band switches to a slow, twangy 90s country track, the same song Clay and his wife danced to at their 25th anniversary party, and couples start swaying on the grass in front of the stage. Maren nods at the crowd, then looks back at him, her cheeks pink from the heat and the beer. “I haven’t danced since my sister’s wedding two years ago,” she says. Her fingers brush his wrist, light, testing, and she doesn’t pull away when he doesn’t flinch. “Don’t make me drag you, Bennett.”
He hesitates for half a second, thinks about the grudge, about the empty house he’s been going home to for three years since his wife passed, about how he hasn’t wanted to be anywhere but that empty house since the funeral. Then he takes her hand, her palm rough from clay, calloused in the same spots his are from holding line tools for 35 years, and walks her to the dance floor. They sway slow, their chests a few inches apart at first, then closer when she rests her free hand on his bicep, and he can smell the lavender cream and the faint hop tang of the beer on her breath, can feel the heat of her hand through his shirt. He admits he was an ass for ignoring her calls, for talking trash about her at the hardware store for two years, and she laughs, her breath warm against his neck. “I would’ve been mad too,” she says. “You put 22 years into that fair. I’d have cussed me out too.”
The song ends, and they don’t let go of each other’s hands. She says she already filled out the paperwork for his lineman showcase at the fall fair, saved him the biggest booth by the main entrance, and she’s been collecting old photos of the fair from the town library to hang up. He grins, the kind of real, unforced grin he hasn’t had since before his wife got sick, and says he’ll bring his own stack of albums, the ones with photos of the crew up on poles mid-storm, the year the elephant from the petting zoo escaped and walked through the pie contest.
He lifts her hand to his mouth, brushes a kiss across her knuckles, and for the first time in three years, he doesn’t feel like leaving the party early.
