Russell Pritchard, 62, retired electric co-op lineman, wiped hickory BBQ sauce off his forearm with a frayed paper towel and leaned against the tent pole of his late friend Jase’s cookoff booth. The August heat hung thick enough to sip, sweet with the smell of smoked brisket and cotton candy, the bluegrass band at the main stage thrumming low enough that the bass rumbled through the splintered picnic table under his boots. He’d been manning the booth alone since Jase’s kid bailed to go ride the Ferris wheel with his girlfriend, and he was half considering ditching the last hour of his shift to head home and mess with the 1978 F-150 he was restoring when a shadow fell across the table.
He looked up, squinting against the golden hour sun, and blinked. Marnie Carter. Jase’s little sister, the one he’d not seen since she moved to Chicago for college 30 years prior, was leaning against the opposite side of the table, wearing cutoffs and a faded floral button down, silver streaks catching the light in her dark hair. She grinned, and he saw the same gap between her two front teeth that she’d had when she was 9, bringing him lemonade after he crashed Jase’s dirt bike and split his eyebrow open on an oak root. “You still have that scar,” she said, nodding at the thin white line over his left eye, before he could even say hello. Her voice was lower than he remembered, rough around the edges from too many years of concert tickets and menthols, he guessed.
He grunted a laugh, suddenly self-conscious of the sauce smudge on his cheek, the hole in the elbow of his work shirt. He’d spent 20 years closed off after his ex-wife left him for a travel nurse half his age, convinced he was too gruff, too set in his ways of cold beer and early mornings in the garage, to be worth anyone’s attention. And Marnie? She was always off limits, Jase’s little sister, the kid he’d helped teach to skip rocks at the creek, the one he’d chased off a handful of bad boyfriends her senior year of high school. He’d never once allowed himself to look at her like that, even when she’d showed up to his 30th birthday party in a dress that made his ears burn, back before she left town.
She slid onto the bench next to him, close enough that her bare knee brushed his denim-clad one when she shifted, and he felt his neck go warm. The vanilla lotion she was wearing cut through the hickory smoke sharp and sweet, and he found himself leaning in a little without meaning to. She asked about the F-150, said her mom had mentioned he was still fixing up old trucks in his garage, and when he told her about the time Jase had totaled his first truck trying to impress a cheerleader, she laughed so hard she snort-laughed, and reached out to touch his forearm to steady herself. Her hand was soft, warm, calloused at the fingertips from arranging flowers, she said, she’d moved back three months prior to take over her mom’s flower shop downtown.
He fought the urge to pull away, fighting a familiar, sharp twist of guilt in his gut, like he was doing something wrong, like Jase would pop around the tent pole and smack him upside the head for even talking to her this close. Then he remembered the last conversation he’d had with Jase, two weeks before the construction accident that killed him, Jase telling him he needed to stop moping over his ex, stop acting like he had to be alone for the rest of his life. “Find someone who sees you, not just the grumpy guy who climbs power poles,” Jase had said, knocking back a beer on Russell’s porch.
Marnie was still holding eye contact, longer than she needed to, her thumb brushing over the scar on his forearm from a line fire back in ‘07, and he realized he hadn’t felt this nervous around a woman since he was 16, asking his first girlfriend to prom. She reached up suddenly, swiping a smudge of BBQ sauce off his jaw with her thumb, her fingers lingering on the rough stubble on his cheek for a beat too long. “I asked my mom about you the first week I was back,” she said, quiet enough that only he could hear her over the band, the yells of kids chasing each other with snow cones. “Always had a stupid crush on you, back when I was a kid. Thought you were the toughest, nicest guy I ever met.”
Russell’s brain went blank for a second, the cold condensation from his beer dripping down his wrist onto his jeans. He’d spent so long telling himself he didn’t deserve anything good, that anyone who got close would just leave, that he didn’t know what to say for a full ten seconds. Then he grinned, the kind of real, unforced grin he hadn’t felt in years, and nodded at the fried Oreo stand across the fairgrounds, the one with the neon sign that flickered on and off. “I get off shift in 20 minutes,” he said. “You want to go split an order? They dip ‘em in chocolate now, apparently.”
She smiled, bright and warm, and took the cold Bud Light he held out to her, their fingers brushing when she grabbed it, and she didn’t pull away. They sat there for the next 20 minutes, talking about Jase, about the flower shop, about the F-150 he was almost done restoring, her shoulder pressed to his the whole time, neither of them bothering to shift away. When the bluegrass band kicked into a cover of the Johnny Cash song she’d loved as a kid, she laced her fingers through his calloused ones and didn’t let go.
