Rafe Mendez is 52, a hardwood floor refinisher who’s made a point of skipping every small-town community event in western North Carolina’s Macon County for the last seven years. Grief turned him reclusive after his wife died in a cross-country moving crash, and he’d rather spend his nights sanding oak planks to a soft glow than make forced small talk with people who still treat him like the new guy. He only shows up to the fire department’s annual chili cookoff because his only real friend, the fire chief, showed up to his shop at 4 p.m. holding a free beer and a threat to leave a road-kill possum in the back of his work van if he bailed again.
He’s leaning against the rear fender of Jimmie’s beat-up Ford F-150, jeans still dusted with oak stain from a job that morning, a paper bowl of three-alarm chili in one hand and a cold PBR in the other, when she stumbles into him. She’s wearing a cream cable-knit sweater and faded jeans, brown hair pulled back in a loose braid, and she’d been looking over her shoulder at her husband— the newly elected county commissioner, mid-speech about paving backcountry roads— when she tripped over a cinder block holding up a folding table. Her shoulder bumps his thigh hard when she catches herself, and when she looks up to apologize, her eyes hold his for three full beats too long for polite interaction. He smells jasmine mixed with pine on her, like she’d taken a walk through the national forest before showing up.
She laughs, a quiet, throaty sound that cuts through the noise of kids screaming and the fire department radio crackling, and sits on the F-150’s tailgate next to him instead of walking back to her husband’s crowd. “Sorry about that,” she says, wiping a smudge of chili off her wrist. “I’m avoiding the part where he asks everyone to donate to the road fund. I’m Clara, by the way.” Rafe knows who she is. Everyone in the county knows the commissioner’s wife, the librarian who moved here from Chicago six months prior, the one who’d been on the front page of the local paper last week posing with a stack of new children’s books. He should get up, leave, he doesn’t do messy, doesn’t mess with married women, hasn’t felt any kind of flutter in his chest since his wife died. But he stays.
Their knees brush every time she shifts to get comfortable. She tells him she’s been trying to get approval for six months to refinish the 100-year-old oak floors in the library’s basement reading room, but the county commission keeps shooting down the budget, says it’s a waste of taxpayer money. Rafe says he can do it for free, on weekends, no strings attached, just likes the quiet of empty old buildings. She leans in when he says that, so close her breath brushes the shell of his ear, and he feels the hair on the back of his neck stand straight up. “You’d do that?” she asks, and there’s a warmth in her voice that has nothing to do with the chili or the unseasonably warm October air. He fights the urge to lean into her, disgusted with himself for even entertaining the thought of what this could turn into, but the desire is louder, heavier, settles low in his chest like the weight of a sanding machine.
The fireworks show starts right as her husband finishes his speech, a roar going up from the crowd as the first red burst paints the sky dark pink. No one’s looking at them, everyone’s eyes fixed on the field across the road, the noise loud enough to drown out any conversation that isn’t directly in someone’s ear. She slides her hand over his where it rests on the tailgate, her palm soft, a smudge of blue ink on her knuckle from stamping library books, and he doesn’t pull away. She whispers that her husband is leaving for a three-day conference in Raleigh on Thursday, that the library closes at 7 p.m. He nods, says he’ll clear his schedule, bring the sander and the extra-fine grit sandpaper he uses for old, fragile floors.
She stands up a minute later, brushing crumbs off her jeans, and gives him a small, secret smile that’s not meant for anyone else in the crowd before she walks back to her husband’s side, slipping her hand into his like she didn’t just make plans to be alone with Rafe three days from now. Rafe takes a slow sip of his beer, the spot where her hand rested on his still tingling, and looks down at the chili in his bowl. It’s gone cold, but he doesn’t bother getting up to throw it away. He watches her laugh at a story her husband is telling a group of voters, and he runs his thumb over the ink smudge she left on the side of his hand.
