Ronan O’Malley is 58, a retired heavy haul trucker who restores vintage CB radios out of his garage and keeps 12 hives of Italian honeybees on the two acres he owns outside Athens, Ohio. For 12 years, he’s lived alone, intentionally keeping neighbors at arm’s length after his ex-wife cleaned out their joint bank account and left him for a suburban realtor while he was on a three-week run hauling wind turbine blades across the Dakotas. His worst flaw is he assumes every friendly gesture comes with a hidden bill attached, so he’s spent three months ducking his new next-door neighbor, Clara, every time she waves over the property line.
He’d only come to the fire department’s annual chili cookoff because he owed the fire chief a favor for patching the roof of his bee shed after a summer tornado, and the chief had strong-armed him into entering a batch of his famous smoked brisket chili. He’s standing in line waiting for a cornbread muffin when a teen in a football jersey slams into his back, jostling the paper bowl in his hand so a dollop of chili splatters across the sleeve of the woman standing in front of him. It’s Clara.
He freezes for half a second, then grabs a handful of napkins from the stack by the serving table, stammering an apology as he dabs at the soft faded red flannel covering her forearm. He can feel the solid, warm muscle of her arm under the fabric, and she smells like cinnamon and old paper, the kind that’s sat on a shelf for 40 years and holds the faint ghost of every person who’s ever flipped its pages. She laughs, a low, rough sound like she smokes a couple cigarettes a day, and swats his hand away gently, saying it’s fine, the flannel’s already covered in coffee and ink stains from the vintage bookstore she runs downtown anyway.
All the picnic tables are full by the time they both have their food, so they end up squeezed onto the end of a bench occupied by a group of retired firefighters who’re too busy arguing about last year’s cookoff winner to pay them any mind. Their knees brush under the table the second he sits down, and he tenses like he’s been zapped by a faulty CB wire, ready to yank his leg away before he stops himself. She doesn’t move hers. She takes a bite of his chili, hums, says it’s better than the stuff her dad used to make on the road when he was a long hauler too, that she still has his old road atlas tucked in the glove box of her beat-up 1998 Subaru Outback.
He spends the next 45 minutes bouncing between the familiar urge to make an excuse and leave, to go hide in his garage with a beer and a pile of broken radio parts, and the tight, warm buzz in his chest that comes from someone actually listening when he talks about the old runs, about how you can see the Northern Lights for three straight hours if you drive through North Dakota at the right time of year in January. She asks questions, remembers tiny details he mentioned offhand when they’d spoken for two minutes at the mailbox a month prior, about the hive that kept swarming this summer, about the 1977 Cobra 148 GTL he’s been restoring for a guy in West Virginia.
The sun sets while they’re talking, the air turning sharp enough to make his nose run, and the string lights strung above the picnic area flicker on, gilding the silver streaks that run through her dark curly hair. She offers him a cigarette when the crowd disperses to watch the prize announcements, and they lean against the side of the fire department’s old pumper truck, away from the noise. She leans in to point at a faded scratch on the truck’s bumper, saying she backed into it last winter when she was dropping off boxes of kids’ books for the annual toy drive, and her shoulder presses firm against his chest. He can feel the heat of her through both their jackets, and when she tilts her head up to look at him, her eyes are bright, no flicker of awkwardness, no looking away like he expects.
He admits he’s been avoiding her for three months, that he’s terrible at letting new people in, that he’s convinced every nice thing that happens is just a setup for something to go wrong. She snorts, blows a plume of smoke off to the side, says she noticed, that she’d wave and he’d duck behind his bee hives like he thought she couldn’t see him. He laughs, the first real, unforced laugh he’s had in years, and when she brushes a stray bee sting scar off his knuckle with her thumb, he doesn’t flinch.
He invites her back to his place to look at the 1976 CB operation manual she mentioned she found in a box of old books she bought at an estate sale, says he can talk her through the parts she doesn’t understand, maybe even show her the Cobra he’s restoring. She says yes, no hesitation, and they walk side by side down the dark residential street, the crunch of fallen oak leaves under their boots the only sound besides the faint noise of the cookoff behind them. Their hands brush three times before he works up the nerve to lace his fingers through hers, her palm calloused from turning thousands of book pages, warm even through the thin knit gloves she’s wearing.
He doesn’t let go until they reach his front porch, the glow from his garage work light seeping out under the door to light the step.
