Elias Voss, 52, a forensic accountant specializing in agricultural co-op fraud cases, is three weeks into a messy audit in northern Iowa when he stops at the local VFW’s Friday night fish fry. The Holiday Inn Express down the road only serves rubbery frozen burgers after 7 p.m., and he’s sick of eating alone in his room while scrolling spreadsheets. He slides into a sticky vinyl booth at the back, the plastic tablecloth crinkling under his elbows, and picks at a plate of golden fried cod, the smell of grease and lemon cutting through the faint beer stench hanging in the air. A group of gray-haired vets yells about Big Ten football in the corner, a Patsy Cline deep cut hums low on the jukebox, and he’s already half ready to call it an early night when someone slides into the booth across from him uninvited.
It’s Lila, the woman who runs the town’s native plant nursery, married to an Army reservist deployed to Kuwait for 12 months. He’s only spoken to her twice before, both times when she dropped off baskets of heirloom tomatoes and sweet corn for the co-op’s staff lunches. She’s wearing faded jeans cuffed at the ankle, a flannel tied around her waist, and a thin white tee smudged with potting soil along the hem, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid. She smells like lavender hand lotion and fresh cut grass, a sharp, bright contrast to the heavy fried food scent wrapping around the room, and she teases him immediately about still wearing his work ID lanyard around his neck. He fumbles to tuck it into his shirt pocket, his face heating up, and he can’t remember the last time a woman made him flustered without even trying.
They talk for 45 minutes straight, no mention of spreadsheets or deployment dates or the mess of expense reports he’s been wading through for weeks. She tells him about her 12-year-old son, who’s been obsessing over his 4H show pig for six months, and he tells her about his geriatric beagle back home in Des Moines, who his next-door neighbor watches when he’s out on work trips. Her knee brushes his under the table when she leans forward to steal a french fry off his plate, and he doesn’t move away, the faint pressure of her denim against his sending a jolt up his spine he hasn’t felt in years. When she passes him a slice of peach pie she baked that morning, her fingers brush his for half a second, the rough callus on her thumb from digging in dirt catching on the scar across his left knuckle, the one he got punching a wall the day his ex-wife served him divorce papers eight years prior.
He knows it’s wrong. She’s married, he’s leaving town in six days, this is exactly the kind of messy, unplanned mistake he’s spent almost a decade avoiding, ever since his ex left him for a client he was auditing. Half of him wants to grab his jacket and leave right now, go back to his quiet hotel room and forget this ever happened, the other half never wants to stop listening to her laugh, the crinkles at the corner of her eyes deepening when she teases him about wearing a button-down to a fish fry. The jukebox switches to a slower Patsy Cline track, and a handful of regulars drift to the small dance floor by the bar. She tilts her head at him, asks if he dances. He snorts, says he hasn’t danced since his wedding, but he stands up anyway.
They step onto the floor, his hand resting light on her waist, her hand loose on his shoulder, their fingers laced together loosely at their sides. They keep a respectable distance at first, but when a group of rowdy teens cuts through the floor to get to the soda machine, she stumbles a little and presses into his chest, and he can feel the heat of her body through his shirt, her breath smelling like peach pie and mint gum fanning across his jaw. She whispers that her husband hasn’t called in 21 days, that she’s been so lonely she’s taken to talking to her tomato plants after her son goes to bed, that she knows he’s leaving soon, no one has to know anything if they don’t want to. He thinks about the empty hotel room waiting for him, about 8 years of quiet, lonely nights spent going through spreadsheets alone, about the lie he’s been telling himself that he’s better off not getting attached to anyone.
He doesn’t kiss her right there, not with half the town watching from the bar. He pulls back a little, meets her eyes, the neon Coors Light sign over the bar painting the side of her face soft pink, and tells her he’s free tomorrow at 10, he’s always wanted to see a native plant nursery. She grins, squeezes his hand, and scribbles her address on a crumpled bar napkin before pushing it across the table to him. She leaves 10 minutes later to get home to her son, and he sits back down at the booth, finishes the last of his pie, the napkin tucked into his shirt pocket crinkling against his chest. The group of vets in the corner holler and tease him about finally working up the nerve to talk to Lila, and he just smirks, takes a slow sip of his beer. He folds the napkin carefully when he leaves, tucks it into his wallet next to the crumpled photo of his beagle, and walks to his truck, the cool October Iowa night air stinging his cheeks.
