He’s about to call it a night when someone slides into the picnic bench across from him, knocking his elbow enough that a drop of beer sloshes onto the knee of his frayed work jeans. He looks up, and it takes him three full seconds to place her: Lila Mae Carter, the girl who used to babysit his niece when she was 16, who used to beg him for free maple candy samples every year at the fair, who left for culinary school in Boston when she was 19 and he hadn’t seen since. She’s 38 now, curly auburn hair pulled back in a blue bandana, a faint smudge of flour on her left forearm, wearing a cutoff flannel and cutoff jean shorts, a small silver nose ring glinting under the yellow string lights strung across the tent’s ceiling. She grins, and he recognizes that gap between her two front teeth immediately, the same one she had when she was a kid sneaking fried Oreos behind her mom’s back.
They start talking, and she leans in closer when the band cranks up the volume on a raucous Luke Combs track, her shoulder brushing his bicep, the smell of cinnamon and ripe peaches and coconut sunscreen drifting off her, sharp and sweet over the lingering stench of cow manure and fried dough coming from the livestock barns a few hundred feet away. She says she moved back to the area three months prior, just opened a small pastry shop in downtown Stowe, is selling peach hand pies at the fair all week. She laughs at his dumb story about the time a black bear broke into his sugar shack and ate half a barrel of grade B syrup, snorting a little when he mimics the way the bear looked when Jax caught him, hunched over the barrel with syrup matted in his thick brown fur. Her knee knocks his under the table, warm and solid, and he doesn’t move his leg away, even as a little voice in the back of his head nags him that this is wrong, that he knew her when she was skipping school to go to punk shows in Burlington, that the 15 year age gap is too big, that he’s just setting himself up to get hurt again like he did eight years prior.
He’s halfway through a story about the time a tourist tried to pay him with a hand-drawn portrait of a maple tree for a gallon of amber syrup when she reaches across the table, her fingers brushing his calloused thumb to brush off a splinter he’d gotten earlier that day stacking glass syrup jugs. Her hand is warm, a little sticky from handling pie dough all day, and their eyes lock for a beat, the noise of the fair fading out for half a second. She says she’s been coming to his booth every year she’s been home for visits since she was 18, always thought he was handsome, was too shy to say anything before, thought he was still married until his niece mentioned he was single over coffee last week.
The tent starts emptying out, the band wrapping up their set with a wobbly, crowd-sung version of “Sweet Caroline”, and he offers to walk her to her car, his boots crunching over discarded napkins and cracked glow stick fragments on the asphalt. She links her arm through his, leaning into his side a little when a cool August breeze rolls through, carrying the sharp smell of pine from the woods at the edge of the fairgrounds. They stop by the closed funnel cake stand on the way, and she leans up to kiss him quick, soft and sweet, tasting like peach and lemon seltzer, her hand curled around the back of his sunburnt neck. He asks her if she wants to come back to his place, says he’s got a fresh batch of bourbon barrel aged syrup he’s been testing, says it pairs real good with peach pastries if she’s got any left in her cooler. She nods, grinning that same gap-toothed grin, and tugs him toward the parking lot, her hand laced tight in his.
