The AC is busted the third Friday of July, sweat beading at his hairline under his faded Reds cap, grease spotting the cuff of his frayed work jeans when he takes a bite of crispy cod. He’s wiping his hand on a crumpled napkin when the metal chair across from him scrapes against the sticky linoleum, and he looks up to see Clara Hale, 48, who filed for divorce from the county mayor three weeks prior, the whole town gossiping nonstop about how she’d caught him texting nude photos to a 26-year-old admin in the public works department. Roland’s first thought is she’s at the wrong table, his second is that every set of eyes in the room is pointed their way, his third is that she smells like coconut sunscreen and lime seltzer, the exact kind his wife used to drink on their weekend boat trips to the lake.
Her knee brushes his under the table when she sits, worn denim against worn denim, accidental, but she doesn’t apologize, just smirks like she knows exactly how flustered he is. “Saw you at the pointer trial last Saturday,” she says, reaching across the table to grab a packet of tartar sauce, her elbow brushing his forearm as she leans in. “Your dog took first in the open category, right? The liver-colored one with the lopsided white patch on his chest?” Roland blinks, surprised anyone even noticed he was there, let alone paid attention to his dog. He nods, fumbling for his beer cup, knocks a handful of extra napkins onto the floor. She laughs, a low, warm sound, not the tight, performative laugh he’d seen her use at town hall meetings when she was the mayor’s polished, quiet spouse.
He’s spent the last three weeks listening to the guys at the local feed store call her a gold digger, a troublemaker, claim she only left the mayor because she got caught cheating herself, and part of him wants to tell her to leave, that he doesn’t want to get wrapped up in whatever small-town drama she’s carrying. But the other part of him is fixated on the way her linen sundress strap is slipping off her left shoulder, the smattering of sun freckles across her nose, the way she holds eye contact like she’s not afraid of being seen talking to him, like she doesn’t care who’s watching. She tells him she adopted a skittish German shorthair pointer from the local animal shelter two months prior, can’t get the dog to stop chasing squirrels mid-point, tried three different trainers who all told her the dog was untrainable. “I remembered you used to run the 4-H dog training classes back before you quit scouting,” she says, her hand brushing his when she passes him an extra napkin for the grease smudge he didn’t know was on his chin. “Figured you were the only person in town who wouldn’t charge me an arm and a leg to tell me I’m doing everything wrong.”
The guys at the next table are yelling about a rec league softball fight from the night before, the beat-up portable fan behind them is humming so loud it’s hard to hear anything else, but Roland doesn’t care. He tells her he doesn’t do private lessons, hasn’t in years, but she tilts her head, grins, and says she’s got a cooler of the hazy craft IPA he likes that the local brewery only makes once a summer, sitting in her fridge. He hesitates, thinks about how the gossip will spread by Saturday morning, about how he’s spent four years carefully avoiding any situation that would make people talk about him for anything other than his dog or his dead wife. But then she leans in a little closer, and he can feel the heat of her arm against his, can see the tiny gold fleck in her right eye that he never noticed before at all the town events they’d both attended over the years, and he realizes he’s tired of hiding.
He nods, says he can come by for an hour, check out the dog. She grins, stands up, slings her frayed canvas dog training bag over her shoulder. He walks out behind her, his hand brushing the small of her back when they step through the door into the thick, humid July dusk, crickets chirping loud in the uncut grass along the sidewalk. Her beat-up silver Ford F150 is parked two spots down from his old Chevy, the passenger window rolled down, a half-chewed deer antler dog toy on the floor mat. She opens the passenger door for him, and he slides into the seat, the vinyl still warm from the afternoon sun, her half-empty lime seltzer sitting in the cup holder next to a dog training manual with messy, enthusiastic notes scrawled in the margins in bright pink pen.
