Elias Voss, 62, spent the last eight years living like a ghost on the 10 acres of scrub oak and pasture he’d shared with his late wife Linda outside Athens, Tennessee. A retired lineman for the local electric co-op, he’d walked away from every casual advance from the widows and divorcees in town, convinced even a coffee date would count as betrayal, his biggest flaw a stubborn refusal to let himself be happy when Linda couldn’t be. Most days he worked on his half-restored 1972 Chevy C10 in his cinder block garage, only venturing into town once a week for peaches at the farmers market and a single PBR at Moe’s Taphouse before heading home.
The screen door slapped shut behind him when he walked in the third week of August, the air thick with the smell of fried dill pickles and stale cigarette smoke, the jukebox blaring old Johnny Cash cuts. He slid onto his usual stool at the far end of the bar, far from the group of construction workers yelling over a pool game, and held up a finger to the bartender he’d never seen before. She was tall, with sun-weathered skin and a braid streaked with silver falling over her left shoulder, a faint white scar snaking up her forearm from wrist to elbow. She set a frosty PBR down in front of him 10 seconds later, their fingers brushing when he reached for the mug, and he flinched like he’d touched a live wire. “Easy there, lineman,” she said, grinning, the corners of her hazel eyes crinkling. “I saw your co-op jacket hanging in your truck when you pulled up. No need to act like I burned you.”
He grunted, took a long sip of beer, and tried not to stare. He learned her name was Clara, 58, in town to help her sister recover from knee replacement surgery, a former Wyoming park ranger who’d retired after a grizzly bear charged her on a backcountry trail. She stayed behind the bar, wiping down glasses, but she leaned in when he spoke, close enough that he could smell the coconut shampoo in her hair and the mint of her gum, and she laughed at his dumb joke about the time a raccoon chewed through a transformer and knocked out power to half the county for 12 hours. He left an hour later, his chest tight with a feeling he hadn’t felt since Linda was alive, and he kicked himself the whole drive home for even thinking about asking her out.
He showed up the next week 20 minutes earlier than usual, bringing a jar of the honey he kept bees for in his backyard, because she’d mentioned she put honey in her iced tea. She thanked him, her hand lingering on his when she took the jar, and said she’d been trying to find someone to fix the flat on her beat-up 1998 Ford F-150, that all the mechanics in town were booked three weeks out. He hesitated for a full minute, the voice in his head screaming that he was crossing a line, that Linda would hate him, before he said he had the tools at his garage, or he could come by her sister’s place after her shift if she wanted. She scribbled the address on a napkin, slid it across the bar, and winked. “Bring beer. I’ll have fried pickles waiting.”
He sat in his truck in her driveway for 10 minutes before he worked up the nerve to get out, the sky turning soft pink and orange as the sun set, fireflies flickering in the oak trees lining the yard. She was sitting on the porch steps, a glass of sweet tea in her hand, and she waved when she saw him. He fixed the flat in 12 minutes flat, his hands moving on autopilot from decades of patching tires on work trucks in the middle of thunderstorms, and she handed him a cold IPA when he was done, patting the step next to her so he’d sit down.
Their knees brushed every time one of them shifted, the rough denim of their jeans scraping together, and when she leaned in to point out a red fox trotting across the front yard, her shoulder pressed firm against his, warm through the thin fabric of his work shirt. He didn’t pull away. She turned to face him, their faces only six inches apart, and held his eye contact for 10 long seconds, no smirk, no joke, just a soft, quiet look, before she leaned in and kissed him. Her lips were soft, tasted like mint and IPA, and for the first time in eight years, he didn’t feel guilty for wanting something. He kissed her back, his hand coming up to cup the side of her face, the scar on her forearm pressing against his wrist when she rested her hand on his knee.
They sat on the steps for another hour, talking, her head resting on his shoulder while crickets chirped in the grass, and he told her about Linda, about how he’d thought he’d spend the rest of his life alone, that he’d felt like dating again would be spitting on her memory. She laced her fingers through his, her calloused park ranger hands a perfect match for his lineman calluses, and said her husband had died 10 years earlier in a logging accident, that she’d spent seven years avoiding anyone who showed interest too, until she realized he’d yell at her for wasting the rest of her life being sad.
He drove home that night with the windows rolled down, the cool August air blowing through his hair, a smile he couldn’t wipe off his face tugging at the corners of his mouth, and he stopped at the corner flower shop right as it opened the next morning, picking up a bouquet of sunflowers, the ones she’d mentioned offhand were her favorite when they’d talked about the park service planting wildflower fields in Wyoming. He handed them to her when she walked into the bar for her shift, and she laughed, leaning up to kiss his cheek in front of the regulars, none of whom even blinked, like they’d all been waiting for him to stop being an idiot for years.
