He’s half considering bailing early when someone slams into his left side hard enough to slosh half his cider down the front of his faded gray flannel. He’s about to snap a retort when he looks down and sees Clara Marlow, the woman who opened the pie stand on the edge of town six months prior, holding two slices of pear pie in disposable tins, her face flushed pink from the cold and the jostle. She’s wearing a frayed flannel of her own, work boots caked in orchard mud, a streak of flour on her left cheek he’s been too stubborn to mention every time he’s driven past her stand the last few months.
“Shit, I am so sorry,” she says, grabbing a crumpled napkin from her jacket pocket and dabbing at the wet spot on his sleeve before he can protest. Her hand brushes his forearm for half a second, and he smells cinnamon and baked apple on her, her nails chipped a deep burgundy like she’d been picking fruit that morning and forgot to touch up the polish. He freezes, his mouth going dry, and has to remind himself to breathe, because he hasn’t been this close to a woman he finds attractive since his wife’s funeral.
“Nah, it’s fine,” he mumbles, stepping back a half foot like he’s been burned, already mentally kicking himself for being so awkward. “Cider washes out. No harm done.”
She insists on giving him one of the pie slices as compensation, and when a group of drunk college students pushes past them, she steps even closer to avoid being knocked over, their shoulders pressed tight together for a full ten seconds. He can feel the heat of her through both their jackets, and he finds himself leaning into it before he can stop himself. She makes a joke about the lead singer’s voice sounding like a cat being stepped on, and he laughs, a real, loud laugh he hasn’t let out in public in years.
They talk for 20 minutes, leaning against the same tent pole, their knees brushing every few seconds when someone walks past. He learns she’s 58, divorced, moved north from Chicago to get away from her ex-husband’s constant nitpicking, that she’s been baking pies since she was 10 and her grandma taught her to make peach cobbler in their tiny apartment kitchen. He tells her about his wife, about the vineyard, about the woodcarving hobby he does in his garage when he’s not supervising harvest crews. He keeps catching himself staring at her mouth when she talks, the way she tucks a strand of gray-streaked brown hair behind her ear when she laughs, the crinkles at the corners of her eyes when she teases him for wearing socks with sandals.
He’s fighting a war in his head the whole time, half of him screaming to ask her to get coffee sometime, the other half reminding him that letting someone new in means risking the kind of pain he spent eight years recovering from. He’s just about to make an excuse to leave, to run back to his quiet cottage and his predictable routine, when she mentions she’s been trying for three weeks to fix the damper on her cottage’s old woodstove, can’t get it to stay open long enough to heat the place through on cold nights.
“I know that model,” he says before he can think better of it. “I fix those all the time for the crew’s cabins out at the vineyard. I could swing by tomorrow afternoon, if you want. Won’t take more than 20 minutes.”
She holds his gaze for three full seconds, no look away, no awkward smile, just steady, warm eye contact, and he feels his face heat up like he’s a 16 year old asking a girl to prom for the first time. “I’d like that a lot,” she says, and her voice is softer than it was a minute before, like she knows exactly how much courage it took for him to offer.
The band switches to a slow, scratchy Merle Haggard track, and she nods toward the tiny patch of dirt the festival calls a dance floor. “You know how to two step?” she asks.
“Haven’t danced since my wedding,” he says, already shifting his weight like he’s considering it.
“Good,” she says, grinning, holding out her hand. “I’m terrible at it. We can look like fools together.”
He takes her hand, her palm calloused from hours of kneading dough, warm even through the crisp October chill. They step onto the dance floor, and he steps on her toe 30 seconds in, making her snort so loud a couple next to them glances over. She leans into his shoulder for half a second when she laughs, her hair brushing his jaw, and he doesn’t even care that people are looking. When the song ends, he doesn’t let go of her hand.
