Earl Hagerty, 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, had manned the same spot at the Summit County Farmers Market every Saturday for three years straight. He showed up at 6 a.m. sharp, hauled six custom Adirondack chairs out of his beat-up 2008 Silverado, set out a hand-painted sign that read $125 CUSTOM CARVES AVAILABLE, and drank bad gas station coffee until the crowds rolled in. His biggest flaw, if you asked his older sister Peg, was that he’d locked every part of his life that didn’t involve sanding lumber or watching Cleveland Guardians games behind a brick wall the day his wife Linda died eight years prior. He’d turned down every blind date, every coffee invite from the widowed librarian at the public library, every not-so-subtle nudge from the church ladies who brought him casseroles that mostly went to his neighbor’s golden retriever.
The third week of September, the jam booth two spots over changed hands. The old guy who’d sold cloyingly sweet strawberry preserves for a decade moved to Florida to be near his grandkids, and a woman named Mara showed up in his place, hauling crates of glass jars sealed with gingham lids, a handwritten menu listing blackberry, peach bourbon, and spiced apple butter scrawled in loopy cursive. She was 58, had sun-streaked gray hair pulled back in a braid, and wore flannel shirts that smelled like lavender laundry detergent and burnt sugar from stirring pots on her stove until 2 a.m. the night before market.
She walked over to his booth an hour after opening, boots crunching on fallen maple leaves that were already starting to turn burnt orange. The hem of her jeans was smudged with jam. “Got a wobbly leg on my display table,” she said, leaning against the edge of his booth so close he could feel the heat off her shoulder through his flannel. “Heard the wood guy around here doesn’t charge for tiny favors.” Earl grunted, grabbed the Allen wrench set he kept in his coverall pocket, and followed her over. When they knelt down to prop the table up while he tightened the screw, her shoulder pressed flush to his for 12 full seconds. He counted. He didn’t move away.
The guilt hit him 10 minutes later, when he was back at his booth sanding a rough edge on a cherry chair. He’d barely even looked at another woman since Linda died, and here he was replaying the way her laugh crinkled the corners of her eyes like he was a 16-year-old kid staring at a cheerleader across the cafeteria. He told himself he was being an idiot. Told himself he was betraying the 32 years he’d had with Linda, that he was too old for that kind of nonsense, that he was perfectly fine eating frozen dinners alone every night.
He avoided her booth for the rest of the morning, even when he smelled the fresh peach jam she was passing out samples of, even when he heard her laugh at a customer’s bad joke. It started drizzling around 1 p.m., the kind of fine, cold rain that seeps through your coat if you stand in it too long. Most vendors started packing up early. Earl was hefting the last unsold chair into the bed of his truck when he heard footsteps behind him.
He turned around. Mara was holding a jar of peach jam, the lid tied with a thin red ribbon. “For the table fix,” she said, holding it out. When he reached to take it, their fingers brushed. Her hands were calloused at the knuckles, from stirring pots and hauling crates, same as his were from sanding lumber. “Mabel from the pie booth told me about Linda,” she said, soft enough that no one else could hear. “My husband died five years ago. I spent three years thinking if I let myself be happy about anything, I was cheating on him. Turns out they don’t want us moping around eating cold cereal for dinner forever.”
Earl stared at the jar in his hand for a long time. The rain was picking up, dotting the label of the jam with dark little splotches. He’d spent eight years convincing himself that any joy that didn’t involve Linda’s memory was wrong, that he had to punish himself for outliving her, that the empty house was just what he deserved. The guilt was still there, tight in his chest, but it was lighter now, like someone had lifted a cinder block off his sternum.
“Got a pot of chili on the stove at my place,” he said, before he could talk himself out of it. “Made enough for an army. It’s got habaneros in it, if you like that kind of heat.” Mara smiled, the kind of smile that made the corners of her eyes crinkle so deep he could see little silver lines fanning out from her temples. She tossed her crate of unsold jam into the back of her Subaru, then climbed into the passenger seat of his Silverado without asking. He wiped the rain off the driver’s side window with the sleeve of his flannel, turned the key in the ignition, and pulled out of the parking lot, the jar of jam sitting warm in the cup holder between them.
