Moe Vukovich is 59, spent 32 years climbing utility poles for the southern Indiana electric co-op before a blown knee took him out three years back. His knuckles are crisscrossed with thin white scars from cutting line in ice storms, he still keeps a folding lineman’s knife clipped to his jeans pocket even when he’s just running errands, and he’s turned down every blind date his sister has set him up on since his wife Diane died eight years ago. His biggest flaw, if you ask the ladies at the church bake sale, is that he’s too stubborn to let anyone get close enough to see he’s not as gruff as he acts.
He’d dragged himself to the annual town street fair only because his sister had begged him to pick up her favorite peach pie before they sold out, and he owed her for driving him to physical therapy after his knee surgery. He was leaning against a splintered split-rail fence by the pie stand, sipping a cold root beer in a dented foam cup, condensation dripping down his wrist and pooling in the crease of his scarred knuckles, when she tripped over a loose hay bale three feet in front of him.
He reacted faster than he expected, reaching out to catch her wrist first, calloused fingers wrapping around warm, soft skin dusted with a fine layer of something he later realized was clay, then steadying her elbow as she righted herself, the stack of hand-thrown ceramic mugs she’d been carrying tilting only slightly before she got her balance. She held his gaze for three full beats longer than polite small-town custom allows, dark brown eyes crinkling at the corners when she grinned, and he realized he recognized her. Lila Marlow, his son’s old high school art teacher, 47, moved back to town six months prior to run the community pottery studio out of the old feed mill on the edge of town, recently divorced from a lawyer in Louisville, if the diner gossip was to be believed.
He tried to step back to give her space, but his knee locked up for half a second, and their shoulders brushed, the thin cotton of her linen shirt soft against the faded flannel he’d thrown on over his t-shirt to fight off the evening chill. She didn’t move away. “I remember you,” she said, wiping a smudge of gray clay off her cheek with the back of her hand, the movement leaving a faint streak across her jaw. “You fixed the power outage in the art wing during the senior show 15 years ago. You stayed an hour late just to make sure the kiln didn’t shut off mid-fire.”
Moe felt his ears go pink, a reaction he hadn’t had since he was a teen sneaking into the drive-in with Diane. He’d forgotten that night entirely, had only stayed because the art teacher at the time had begged him, said the kids had spent three months on those pieces. He grunted, shifting his weight off his bad knee, and nodded. “Didn’t think anyone remembered that.”
“People remember more than you think, Moe Vukovich,” she said, and the way she said his name, slow, like she was tasting it, made something tight in his chest loosen for the first time in years. She nodded at the root beer in his hand, then at the empty spot on the fence next to him. “I’ve got 20 minutes before my booth shift starts. You got time to tell me why you’ve been hiding out on your farm instead of coming to any of the studio open houses?”
He hesitated, part of him screaming that this was wrong, that he was supposed to still be mourning Diane, that the town gossips would be staring already, whispering about the hermit lineman hitting on the new pottery teacher. But another part of him, the part that hadn’t felt alive since he’d held Diane’s hand for the last time in the hospital, was curious, hungry for the warmth of her attention, for the way she was looking at him like he was more than just the grumpy old guy who fixed power lines. He slid over on the fence, making space for her.
They talked for 25 minutes, longer than she said she had, and when her friend came to get her for her booth shift, she slipped a small, chipped blue ceramic coaster into his hand, rough and smooth at the same time, etched with a tiny line drawing of a utility pole. “I’m staying late at the studio tonight firing a batch of mugs,” she said, leaning in like she was telling him a secret, her hair brushing his shoulder, her breath smelling like peppermint and lemonade. “No one else will be there. If you want to come learn how to throw a pot. No pressure.”
He sat on that fence for 10 minutes after she left, turning the coaster over in his hand, fighting the war in his head. Disgust at himself for even considering it, like he was cheating on Diane, warred with the quiet, giddy excitement he hadn’t felt in decades, the sense that for the first time in forever, someone was seeing him, not just the widowed lineman with the bad knee. He dropped the pie off at his sister’s, mumbled an excuse when she asked why he was grinning, and drove out to the old feed mill an hour later.
The studio smelled like wet clay and cedar and a faint hint of lavender, soft jazz playing low from a speaker in the corner, fairy lights strung along the exposed ceiling beams. Lila was wiping down a pottery wheel, apron tied loose around her waist, a smudge of clay on her neck when she looked up and grinned. He didn’t say anything, just walked over, and when she gestured for him to sit at the wheel, he did.
She stood behind him when he put his hands on the lump of wet clay, wrapping her hands over his, warm and firm, guiding his fingers to press into the center as the wheel spun. Her chest pressed lightly against his back, he could feel her breath on the shell of his ear, and for the first time all night, he didn’t feel guilty, didn’t overthink it, just let himself be present. The lopsided mug they made was ugly, lopsided on one side, the handle too thick, but when he got home the next morning, he poured his coffee into it instead of the chipped Disney mug Diane had brought back from their Florida vacation in 2007.
