Rudy Galvan is 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, three years out from losing his wife to lung cancer, and the only reason he’s at the downtown summer beer festival is because his 14-year-old grandson begged him to stop by the 4H wood carving demo. He’s got a chipped plastic cup of hazy IPA in one hand, calloused work boots planted in loose gravel, and he’s already mentally mapping his exit route when someone trips over the cooler cord at his feet.
He reaches out without thinking, wraps his rough palm around the stranger’s elbow to steady them, and comes face to face with Elara Voss. She’s 58, runs the herb farm on the edge of town, and was married to his former department head for 27 years. For 12 of those years, that man made Rudy’s work life a living hell, cutting funding for his woodshop program, calling his after-school build club “a babysitting service for delinquents”, even trying to get him fired for letting students build raised garden beds for the local food bank instead of working on state-mandated test prep. Rudy had written Elara off by association for decades, figured she was just as stuck-up and stuck in her ways as her ex.
She blinks up at him, sun glinting off her silver hoop earrings, and laughs, a low, warm sound that cuts through the hum of the festival crowd. “Guess I shouldn’t have had that hard seltzer on an empty stomach,” she says, and he realizes he’s still holding her elbow. He pulls his hand back fast, like he touched a hot piece of cedar fresh out of the planer, and nods at the jar of infused lavender honey she’s clutching in her other hand. “Selling samples?” he asks, and she holds it out for him to look at, their fingers brushing when he takes it. The skin on her wrist is soft, sun-warmed, smells like lemon balm, and he has to fight the stupid urge to run his thumb over the faint freckles dusted there.
He hates that he’s even standing here talking to her. For years, he’d roll his eyes when people mentioned her name, tied as it was to every bad memory he had from his last decade of teaching. But then she says she saw his custom cedar birdhouses at the farmers market last month, loved the tiny carved oak leaves he adds to the roofline of every one, and mentions she still uses the raised beds his woodshop kids built for her herb farm back in 2013. He’d forgotten about that, forgotten she was the one who brought homemade lavender lemonade for the kids every day they were out there, forgotten how she’d told his boss at the time that those beds were the best investment the school had ever made.
They lean against the side of the taco truck for 20 minutes, talking, and he barely notices the crowd swirling around them. She tells him she divorced her ex two years ago, after she found out he’d been embezzling funds from the school’s activity budget. Rudy snorts, says he’s not surprised, and she laughs so hard she snorts, then claps a hand over her mouth like she’s embarrassed. The gap between them shrinks, little by little, until their shoulders are almost touching, and he can smell the citrus in her hair, hear the faint lilt in her voice when she teases him about the fact that every single widow in the tri-county area has tried to set him up with a friend in the last year. He admits he’s turned every single one down, hates the idea of sitting through a dinner date with someone who only sees him as “the quiet widowed woodshop guy” instead of the guy who still listens to 90s punk while he works, who once drove 12 hours to Tennessee to pick up a vintage table saw for $200, who still leaves a cup of coffee out for his wife on the kitchen counter every morning even though she’s gone.
She goes quiet when he says that, and for a second he thinks he messed up, overshared, scared her off. But then she says she does the same thing, leaves a glass of iced tea out on her porch rail every morning for her old hound dog who passed last year, and he feels something tight in his chest loosen up, like a knot in a piece of walnut finally giving way under sandpaper.
She nods toward the dirt trail that leads down to the creek behind the festival grounds, away from the noise. “Wanna walk?” she asks, and he hesitates. Everyone in this small town talks. If anyone sees them walking off together, word will get back to her ex by the end of the night, and the guy will throw a fit the likes of which no one has ever seen. There’s a stupid, giddy thrill to that, the kind he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager sneaking out of the house to go to rock shows. He nods, takes the honey jar from her so she doesn’t trip over anything else, and follows her down the trail.
The gravel gives way to soft grass, the noise of the festival fading behind them, replaced by the sound of crickets chirping and water running over smooth stones. They stop at a weathered wooden bench half-hidden by oak trees, and he sits, her sitting down right next to him, their thighs pressing together through their jeans. She reaches over, runs a finger along the thick, faded scar on his left knuckle, the one he got from a table saw accident back in 2008. “I remember when that happened,” she says, quiet. “Your ex boss made a joke in the staff lounge about you being too careless to run a shop. I told him to go to hell.”
He blinks, turns his hand over, and laces his fingers through hers. Her hand fits perfectly in his, like a custom joint he spent three hours cutting to fit just right. Somewhere behind them, a cover band starts playing a Tom Petty track they both know, and he doesn’t let go of her hand even when a group of 4H kids walks past on their way back to the festival.
