Ray Pritchard, 62, spent 38 years carrying and supervising rural postal routes across northwest Ohio, retired three years prior, and hasn’t worn anything but steel-toe work boots and faded USPS polos since his wife Diane died four years back. He avoids every neighborhood event like they’re handing out jury duty summons, only agreeing to show up to the annual West Elm Street block party because his 16-year-old niece, crashing with him for the summer, threatened to post all his old high school marching band sequined uniform photos on Facebook if he didn’t bring the brisket he smoked low for 12 hours the night before.
The July air hangs thick enough to drink, sharp with charcoal smoke, cut grass, and the sickly sweet tang of the cotton candy stand set up in the Johnson’s front yard. Some kid’s blaring Garth Brooks through a beat-up portable speaker half a block down, and Ray’s leaning against the tailgate of his dented 2004 Silverado, sipping a lukewarm root beer, doing his best to avoid eye contact with anyone who looks like they want to ask how he’s holding up.
He doesn’t see Marisol Cruz approach until she’s a foot away, close enough that he catches the scent of coconut sunscreen and old paper clinging to her linen button-down. Marisol, 58, moved into the old Henderson place two blocks over last fall, runs the tiny used bookstore on Main Street that’s been there since the 70s. He’s only spoken to her twice: once when he dropped off three boxes of Diane’s old romance novels he couldn’t bring himself to throw away, once when she brought him a jar of homemade habanero salsa after he helped push her dead Prius out of a snowbank in January. She’s got a thin scar slicing above her left eyebrow from a motorcycle crash when she was 22, silver hoop earrings that catch the golden hour light so they look like they’re glowing, and a gap between her two front teeth that shows when she grins.
She holds out a paper plate loaded with a slice of peach cobbler, the crust still crumbly at the edges. “Heard you don’t like stuff that’s too sweet,” she says, leaning in just far enough that her forearm brushes his when she passes the plate over. Their fingers brush for half a second when he takes it, her palm calloused the same way his is, hers from decades of turning book pages, his from hefting 50-pound mail bundles in the rain and snow. He’s surprised by how warm her skin is, even through the paper plate.
For a split second, he’s flooded with that sharp, familiar disgust he gets whenever he feels even a flicker of interest in anyone who isn’t Diane, like he’s breaking a promise he never actually made. He’d told himself four years ago he was done with all that, that dating at their age was just a sad race to see who ended up in a nursing home first, that he’d be perfectly fine spending the rest of his life alone with his dog and his stack of old western novels. But then she laughs, loud and snorty, at the guy in the inflatable flamingo pool three houses down who just face-planted into the shallow end, and that flicker of interest gets harder to stamp out.
They lean against the tailgate for two hours, talking, their shoulders brushing every time one of them shifts to get a better look at the chaos of the party. He tells her about the time he got chased a quarter mile down a dirt road by a rogue goose on his route in 2001, still has a scar on his calf from the bite. She tells him about the time she got stuck in her bookstore’s back elevator for three hours with her ex-husband, who she hadn’t spoken to in six years before that. The sun dips below the oak trees at the end of the block, the string lights strung between the houses flicker on, and fireflies start blinking in the grass at their feet.
She tucks a strand of gray-streaked dark hair behind her ear, her hand brushing his bicep when she pulls it back, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away like he does when anyone else touches him. He finds himself asking her if she wants to head out early, go get a chocolate milkshake at the diner on the edge of town, the one that’s been open since 1952, still makes them with real vanilla ice cream and enough whipped cream to cover the top of the glass.
She grins, that gap between her teeth showing, and says yes. He yells over to his niece, who’s hanging out by the cotton candy stand with a group of local kids, that he’s heading out, and she winks and yells back that she’ll wrap up the leftover brisket and leave it in the fridge for him. He opens the passenger door of the Silverado for her, and she climbs in, the scent of coconut sunscreen lingering in the cab long after she’s settled into the seat. He turns the key in the ignition, the old radio kicks on playing a Johnny Cash track he and Diane used to dance to in their kitchen on Saturday nights, and he reaches over to turn the volume up instead of switching the station.
