Roland Voss, 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, had only showed up to the small town Ohio summer street fair to drop off the custom bluebird house he’d donated to the 4H raffle. He’d promised himself he’d be gone in 10 minutes max, no small talk, no stopping for overpriced lemonade, no getting roped into listening to the local cover band butcher 70s rock. His flannel shirt was already sticking to his back in the 82 degree humidity, and the smell of fried dough curling from the food booths made his stomach twist—Linda had always loved the fair’s fried dough, loaded with powdered sugar, and he’d avoided the event entirely the last 8 years since she’d passed. That’s the flaw he’d never admitted out loud: he’d built a concrete wall between himself and any casual joy, convinced opening up again would be a betrayal of the 34 years they’d had together.
He’d just stuffed the crumpled raffle ticket the 4H kid pressed on him into the pocket of his worn work jeans and was turning to head for his beat-up Ford F150 when a stack of dog-eared mystery novels teetered off the edge of the library book sale booth 10 feet away. He moved before he thought, grabbing the edge of the cardboard box before it spilled all over the gravel. Their hands brushed when she reached for the other side of the box, his calloused from decades of running planers and sanding reclaimed cedar, hers smudged with blue ballpoint ink, cool even in the thick heat.
He knew who she was. Clara Mendez, 58, the new librarian who’d moved to town 6 months prior, newly divorced, the subject of every coffee klatch gossip session within a 10 mile radius. The rumor was she’d left her surgeon husband in Columbus for a 28 year old barista, that she was “too loud” “too flirty” “not the right fit for a small town library”. He’d seen her twice at the hardware store, once hauling a bag of concrete mix for the raised garden beds she was building behind the library, once buying canary yellow paint for the kids’ storytime nook, and he’d ducked down the tool aisle both times to avoid talking to her. He didn’t have time for whatever drama people insisted she carried.
She didn’t let go of the box right away. She held his gaze, dark eyes crinkling at the corners when she smiled, and he noticed the tiny silver stud in her left nostril, the scuffed brown work boots peeking out under her flowy pale purple linen dress. “You’re the guy who builds those birdhouses, right?” she said, and her voice was lower than he expected, rough around the edges like she’d spent the last hour yelling over the marching band that had paraded through 20 minutes prior. He nodded, dumb for a second, because no one except his sister had asked him about his birdhouses in years.
The crowd surged around them, a group of kids chasing each other with water guns, and she stepped closer to avoid getting splashed, her shoulder brushing his bicep through his thin flannel. She smelled like lavender and lemon Pledge, like the library shelves he’d wandered for hours as a kid. She reached behind her for the dented Igloo cooler under the booth, pulled out an iced coffee, condensation dripping down the sides, and held it out to him. “On the house,” she said. “For saving my Agatha Christie collection. Those are my best sellers.”
He took it, even though he’d told himself he was leaving. The cold seeped through the plastic cup into his palm, cutting through the sticky humidity. They leaned against the wooden rail of the booth, shoulders almost touching, and she asked him about the joinery on the birdhouse he’d donated, said she’d seen it sitting on the raffle table earlier, loved that he’d carved tiny oak leaves into the trim. No one had ever noticed the carvings before. He found himself talking longer than he meant to, telling her about the custom birdhouses he built for people all over the county, how he used reclaimed cedar from old barns whenever he could, how bluebirds preferred houses facing east to catch the morning sun.
He laughed. He hadn’t laughed like that in years, loud enough that his sides hurt. When she pointed up at a sparrow darting over the booths, her elbow brushed his bicep again, and he felt the heat of her skin through his shirt, even through the layer of sweat. She twisted the thin silver band on her index finger, the same nervous tic he had when he was about to ask for something he thought he didn’t deserve, and said “The fair closes in an hour. There’s a taco truck on the edge of town that makes carnitas so good you’ll forget your own name. Wanna come?”
He hesitated for half a second, thinking of the empty house waiting for him, the stack of cedar planks in his garage he was supposed to turn into birdhouses that weekend, the unwritten rule he’d made for himself that he’d never let anyone get close again. Then he looked at her, grinning, a streak of blue ink on her cheek, and said yes.
They sat in the taco truck’s gravel parking lot an hour later, the sky turning soft pink and orange as the sun went down, crickets starting to chirp in the grass along the road. She dabs a smudge of salsa off her chin with a crumpled napkin, and when he snorts at the dollop of sour cream she missed on her upper lip, she reaches over, swiping a thumb across his jaw to wipe away a fleck of cilantro he didn’t know was there. Her thumb is warm, calloused at the tip from turning thousands of book pages, and he doesn’t flinch away.
He makes a mental note to grab extra cedar planks on his next hardware run, enough for three birdhouses instead of two.
