Maceo Ruiz, 67, retired airshow pyrotechnics designer, had not set foot at a Lions Club community event in five years. His grandkid Lila had worn him down over three straight nights of dinner table pouting, saying the annual fish fry didn’t stand a chance without someone who knew how to rig a tent without it blowing over in the coastal Oregon gusts. He’d showed up at 8 a.m. in his faded oil-stained Carhartt, work boots caked with pine sap from his backyard workshop, and spent three hours hauling folding tables and hammering tent stakes before he ran into her.
It was an accident. He was carrying 12 folding chairs slung over one shoulder, half turned to yell at a group of teens using a tent stake as a baseball bat, when his shoulder connected with something soft. A tray of lemon bars tilted, powdered sugar poofing into the air, and he grabbed the edge before it could hit the gravel. His calloused fingers, scarred from decades of soldering pyrotechnic fuses and handling explosive compounds, brushed hers. She smelled like lavender hand cream and lemon polish, the exact scent he’d remembered from 1987, when he’d snuck her a cold beer behind the concession stand at the Reno Air Races while her husband Jimmie was hamming it up for a crowd of fans.
Clara Mckinnon blinked at him, then laughed, the sound light and familiar, crinkles fanning out at the corners of her hazel eyes. She’d cut her hair short, silver streaked through dark brown, and wore a linen button down rolled up to her elbows, a smudge of blue ink on her left wrist from stamping library books. She’d moved to town three months prior to take over the tiny public library, she said, after Jimmie died of a heart attack on his fishing boat down in Baja.
Maceo tensed up immediately, his jaw tightening. He’d not thought about that old, stupid crush in decades, had buried it so deep he’d forgotten it existed, back when he was married to Elena, when Jimmie was his best friend, when the closest he’d ever gotten to Clara was passing her a beer or helping her load coolers into the back of their pickup after shows. He felt a sharp twist of guilt, like he was betraying both Elena and Jimmie just by standing there talking to her, even when Lila ran up, grabbed a lemon bar, and darted off to join her friends without so much as a thank you.
They ended up sitting at a picnic table on the edge of the crowd, the smell of fried catfish and hushpuppies curling through the warm air, the distant shriek of kids on the bounce house mixing with the twang of a country cover band playing by the stage. Maceo avoided eye contact at first, picking at a splinter in the table edge, rambling about the new fireworks rig he was building for Lila’s birthday, until Clara teased him about the time he’d accidentally set off a smoke bomb in Jimmie’s trailer, turning all of his white flight suits neon pink.
He laughed then, surprised, and looked at her properly. She was leaning forward, elbows on the table, her knee brushing his under the table on accident every time she shifted, and she didn’t pull away when it happened. She told him she’d asked half the town about him when she moved, that everyone said he’d locked himself away in his workshop after Elena died, that he never came out for anything. She said she’d always thought he was the quiet, kind one, back in the airshow days, that she’d noticed how he’d leave extra bottles of her favorite root beer in the back of their truck when Jimmie was too selfish to remember to pick them up.
The sun dipped below the treeline as they talked, painting the sky pink and orange, and Maceo remembered he had a small portable fireworks display he’d built for Lila tucked in the bed of his truck, the kind that didn’t make enough noise to scare the neighborhood dogs. He asked her if she wanted to walk down to the oak tree at the edge of the park to set it off, away from the crowd, and she nodded, standing up and brushing crumbs off her jeans.
He lit the fuse a few feet away from the tree, and the first firework popped, fizzing into the dark sky in a burst of electric blue. Clara gasped, leaning in closer, her shoulder pressed firm against his, the warmth of her arm seeping through the thick fabric of his Carhartt. He almost pulled away, the old guilt flaring again, until he remembered Elena telling him a few months before she died, when he’d asked what she wanted for him after she was gone, that she wanted him to stop being so damn stubborn, to stop closing himself off from anything that might make him happy.
He laced his fingers through hers, his scarred, rough hand wrapping around her soft, ink-stained one, and she squeezed back, no hesitation. The last firework went off, a shower of pale gold sparks that reflected in her eyes when she turned to look at him, and he didn’t feel guilty anymore. He didn’t kiss her, not yet, not when they were both still raw from years of loss, not when there was plenty of time for that later.
He asked her if she wanted to come by his workshop the next morning, said he had a crumpled 1987 Reno Air Races poster tucked in the back of his toolbox, the one he’d gotten her to sign back then, that he’d never thrown away. She smiled, tilting her head up at him, and squeezed his hand again, her thumb brushing the old scar on his knuckle from a 1999 pyrotechnic misfire. A breeze off the coast picked up, carrying the faint sweet smell of her lavender hand cream, and he didn’t once think to let go of her hand.
