Rusty Pirelli, 58, spent 32 years teaching high school shop before retiring two years prior to carve chainsaw sculptures full time for small Michigan craft fairs. His biggest flaw, as his sister never tired of pointing out, was his stubborn refusal to so much as grab coffee with anyone who showed romantic interest, ever since his ex-wife left him for a traveling RV salesman seven years earlier. He’d convinced himself any new connection would only end in the same quiet, hollow disappointment, and he was too old to waste time on games.
He’d almost bailed on the late October Otsego County fall fair when he saw the vendor list the week prior: Lila Marquez, ex-wife’s first cousin, selling beeswax candles in the booth directly adjacent to his. He’d only met her a handful of times at family holidays back when he was married, remembered her as the quiet kid who snuck outside to smoke instead of listening to his ex’s aunts gossip about everyone’s marriages. He considered faking a cold, but he’d already paid the booth fee and had three custom bear carvings people were supposed to pick up that day, so he showed up at 6 a.m. as scheduled.
She was already hauling boxes out of a beat-up Ford F-150 when he pulled in, silver streaks cutting through the dark braid slung over her shoulder, a smudge of pale yellow beeswax stuck to her left cheek, work boots caked in mud from her beeyard. She dropped a crate of peppermint candle tins when she turned to wave at him, and he knelt to help pick them up, their fingers brushing when they both grabbed for the same dented tin at the same time. Her skin was cold from hauling boxes in the 40-degree air, calloused at the fingertips from handling hives and scraping wax, and he felt a jolt run up his arm he hadn’t felt in close to a decade.
They made small talk through the slow first two hours of the fair, sipping spiced apple cider from the stand at the end of the row, watching kids chase each other with bags of kettle corn. She told him she’d moved back to the area six months prior, left a 15-year marriage to a Chicago lawyer who’d cheated on her with his paralegal, bought 10 acres of land with 40 beehives and a tiny cottage. She said she’d always thought he was the good one in the family, even when his ex spent every family dinner complaining about how he spent too much time in the garage building things instead of paying attention to her. He wanted to lean into that, to laugh and ask her out for a beer after the fair, but the voice in the back of his head kept screaming it was wrong, that family didn’t cross that line, that every holiday for the rest of his life would be awkward if this went south.
She leaned across his table at one point to grab the extra bottle of water he’d set out for her, her flannel-clad shoulder brushing his bicep, the scent of clove perfume mixed with beeswax and cinnamon gum wrapping around him for half a second before she pulled back. She held his gaze for two full beats longer than casual when she joked about his ex’s legendary terrible Thanksgiving meatloaf, the one he’d had to force down every year for 12 years, and he felt his face heat up like he was 16 again talking to a girl for the first time.
The sky turned dark gray around 2 p.m., and a rainstorm hit out of nowhere, cold fat drops pouring down so fast most vendors didn’t have time to pull their tarps over their stock. He grabbed the heavy crate of her glass pillar candles before it could get soaked, hauling it under the awning of his work trailer, and she followed right behind him, both of them pressed shoulder to shoulder under the tiny three-foot overhang, rain dripping off the brims of their baseball caps, no room to move without pressing into each other.
She lifted a hand to wipe a fleck of pine sawdust off his jaw, her thumb brushing his skin for half a second, and told him she’d asked the fair organizers to put her next to his booth on purpose, that she didn’t care what any of the family thought, that she’d had a crush on him since she was 19 and saw him fix her grandma’s broken porch swing at a family reunion. He admitted he’d re-read the vendor list three times the night before, had almost cancelled because he was scared he’d make a fool of himself, that he hadn’t felt this off-kilter around someone since he first asked his ex out back in 1989.
The rain let up 20 minutes later, and fair organizers announced they were shutting down early because the field was turning to thick, soupy mud that would trap most cars if they stayed much longer. He helped her load her boxes into her truck, and she handed him a free pine-scented beeswax candle, her phone number scrawled in blue Sharpie on the bottom of the tin. He stood in the mud holding the candle, the wax still warm from being tucked under his coat while they waited out the rain, and pulled out his flip phone to send her a text before her truck even turned onto the main highway.
