Royce Hale, 52, makes his living sanding rust out of 1960s travel trailers and reupholstering their faded dinette booths out of a cinder block barn 20 minutes outside Boise. His biggest flaw, per his 22-year-old niece who drags him to every local community event, is that he hasn’t spoken to a woman he isn’t related to for longer than 90 seconds since his wife left him for a commercial real estate broker in 2015. He’s got a scar snaking up his left forearm from a falling aluminum awning, permanent grease under his fingernails, and a habit of staring at his work boots when anyone tries to make small talk.
He’s sitting on a sticky vinyl beer tent bench at the county summer fair, half-drunk on a hazy IPA, when she slides into the spot next to him. All the other tables are packed with families yelling over the sound of the Tilt-a-Whirl’s tinny PA, so her strappy leather sandal brushes the scuffed toe of his work boot before she even says hello. He recognizes her immediately: Mara, who runs the blue ribbon peach pie booth every year, whose late husband used to sell hay to Royce’s old neighbor before he passed from a heart attack three years prior. Royce’s ex-wife had always talked about her like she was something cheap, called her “too quick to laugh at every guy’s dumb joke,” so he’d spent a decade deliberately avoiding eye contact whenever he saw her at the grocery store or the feed co-op.
The beer hums warm in his veins when he smells her: vanilla extract, ripe peach, a faint hint of lavender laundry detergent. She’s got flour dusted along her left forearm, a smudge of cinnamon high on her cheekbone, and she’s twisting a crumpled blue napkin between her fingers while she waits for the bartender to bring her order. When she glances over at him, her eyes linger on his knuckles, where he split the skin open last week prying a rusted water line out of a 1971 Scotty Sportsman. “That look like it hurt,” she says, nodding at the half-healed scab.
His first instinct is to mumble something and get up, walk back to his beat-up Ford F-150 and drive home to the quiet of his barn, where the only conversation he has to make is with the barn cat that curls up on his workbench every afternoon. But he’s already halfway through his second beer, and the fair lights are strung up above them in soft gold strands, and her laugh when a kid runs past holding a cotton candy stick twice the size of his head is brighter than he expected. “Worse than the time I dropped a whole dinette set on my foot,” he says, and it comes out rougher than he means it to, but she grins anyway.
They talk for 45 minutes, no lulls, no awkward pauses. She complains about the teenager who spilled lemonade on her entire batch of rhubarb pies earlier that afternoon, costing her a shot at the $500 grand prize for best baked goods. He tells her about the couple who flew in from Chicago last month to pick up the Airstream he spent six months restoring, cried when they saw the custom built-in wood shelves he’d added for their two golden retrievers’ beds. She leans in when he talks, her jean-clad knee brushing his every time someone squeezes past the narrow bench, and he has to fight the urge to reach out and brush that cinnamon smudge off her cheek. The old voice in his head, the one that sounds exactly like his ex, keeps hissing that she’s just being nice, that he’s too rough, too quiet, too set in his ways for someone like her. But every time she snorts at one of his dry, deadpan jokes about the fair’s overpriced corn dogs, the voice gets a little quieter.
When the beer tent starts closing down, the bartenders stacking neon plastic cups and turning off the string lights one by one, he finally works up the nerve. His hand shakes a little when he lifts it, and he’s half convinced she’s going to flinch back, call him a creep, yell loud enough for everyone within 10 feet to stare. But she doesn’t move. She tilts her face up a tiny bit, her eyes soft and dark in the dim remaining light, when his calloused thumb brushes the cinnamon off her cheek, his skin catching on the soft edge of her jaw for half a second. “I’ve seen you at the downtown hardware store at least a dozen times,” she says, quiet enough only he can hear, “I always wanted to say hi, but you looked like you’d bite my head off if I tried.”
He snorts, surprised, because he never realized anyone paid that much attention to him. “I’m just bad at talking to people I actually want to talk to,” he says, and it’s the most honest thing he’s said to anyone in years.
She grabs her canvas purse off the bench, then reaches under the table and pulls out a whole peach pie, still a little warm, wrapped in red checkered wax paper. She shoves it into his hands, her fingers brushing his for longer than necessary, and he can feel the faint heat of the crust seep through the paper onto his palm. “For later,” she says, “If you’re not in a rush to get home, I live 10 minutes from here. My back porch screen’s been broke for two weeks, and I haven’t found anyone who knows how to fix it right. I’ll make you biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast if you stay to help.”
He nods, his throat too tight to talk for a second. He carries the pie in one hand, holds the rickety fairground gate open for her with the other, and when she walks through, her shoulder brushes his chest, light as a peach blossom.
