Elroy Voss, 62, retired lineman for the Hickman County Electric Cooperative, had not set foot at the town’s annual summer street fair in seven years. He’d avoided all large gatherings after his wife, Jean, passed from ovarian cancer, convinced small talk and forced smiles were a waste of the limited quiet time he had left. His only reason for showing up that humid July evening was a promise to his 11-year-old neighbor, Jax, to buy a peach pie from his 4-H booth. He leaned against a splintered cedar fence post, boots dusted with red clay from working on his 1979 Ford F-150 earlier that day, sipping a lukewarm root beer he’d grabbed from a cooler by the bluegrass stage. The linen of his faded co-op work shirt stuck to his shoulders, and he kept checking the time on the beat-up Casio watch Jean had gotten him for their 25th anniversary, ready to bolt as soon as he had the pie in hand.
He spotted her before she spotted him. Marnie Hale, Jean’s second cousin, who’d moved to California straight out of high school and hadn’t been back to town in 20 years, was standing at the fried green tomato stand, wiping grease off her fingers on the leg of her cutoff denim shorts. She wore a faded Lynyrd Skynyrd tee with a hole at the elbow, silver hoops in both ears, and a thin blue jay tattoo curled around her left forearm—Jean’s favorite bird, the one they’d spent hours watching from their back porch every spring. She looked up, caught his eye, and grinned, waving before she even finished paying for her order. He tensed up, half-ready to duck behind the fence post, but she was already weaving through the crowd of kids chasing each other with glow sticks, moving too fast for him to escape.
She stopped so close to him he could smell coconut sunscreen and the briny tang of the fried dill pickle she was holding, her shoulder brushing his bicep when she leaned in to yell over the band’s fiddle solo. “Elroy Voss, I’d know that ratty work shirt anywhere. Jean used to tease you for wearing it to church even when the collar was frayed.” Her voice was a little rougher than he remembered, graveled from decades of smoking and singing in dive bar bands, a detail he’d tucked away in the back of his head when they were all teens, before he’d started dating Jean. When she reached out to pluck the root beer can from his hand to take a sip, her fingers brushed his, and he felt the callus on her thumb from holding guitar picks, the same callus he’d seen once when she’d played a set at the county fair in 1989. He froze, equal parts horrified and warm all over, like he was doing something wrong just by standing that close to her.
He wanted to make an excuse to leave, to say he had to get back to the truck, that he had an early morning fixing a fence on his property, but the words got stuck in his throat when she laughed at his offhand joke about how the co-op crew used to climb power lines in thunderstorms wearing nothing but rubber boots and a prayer. She told him she’d moved back two weeks prior, fixing up her grandma’s old cottage on the edge of town, and the wiring was so shot she couldn’t run her guitar amp and the coffee pot at the same time without blowing a fuse. She asked him if he’d be willing to help her rewire the front room, said she’d pay him in peach pie and cold IPA, no cash necessary. He hesitated, the ghost of Jean’s voice in the back of his head telling him he was being stupid, that he was too old for whatever this was, that he should just go home to his quiet cabin and his truck and stop chasing something he didn’t deserve.
By the time the 4-H booth closed, they were sitting on the tailgate of his F-150 parked at the edge of the fairgrounds, watching the fire department set off fireworks over the high school football field. A red burst lit up her face, and she leaned in to point at a blue firework that bloomed slow across the sky, her hand resting lightly on his knee for three full seconds before she pulled it back. He didn’t flinch. He reached over, brushed a stray strand of sun-bleached dark hair off her forehead, his thumb grazing the soft skin of her cheek, and she didn’t pull away either. He admitted he’d barely spoken to anyone who wasn’t Jax or the guy at the auto parts store in three years, that he’d thought he’d spend the rest of his life alone, that he felt guilty even thinking about being happy with anyone else. She nodded, told him Jean had called her once, six months before she died, and told her if she ever moved back to town, she had to make sure Elroy didn’t spend the rest of his days holed up in that cabin working on old trucks and forgetting how to laugh.
He agreed to be at her cottage at 10 a.m. the following Saturday, bringing his own wire cutters and a pair of work gloves. She leaned in, gave him a quick, soft kiss on the corner of his mouth, then grabbed her bag and hopped into her beat-up forest green Subaru, waving out the window as she pulled out of the parking lot. He sat on the tailgate for another 10 minutes, watching the last of the fireworks fade into the hazy summer sky, the smell of gunpowder and cut clover thick in the air. He picked up the half-eaten dill pickle she’d left sitting on the tailgate, took a bite, and smiled when the brine stung the corner of his mouth.
