Rudy Galvan, 62, spent 31 years teaching welding at the local high school before retiring two years prior, and he’d avoided every community event within a 20 mile radius for the 8 years since his wife Linda died. His former star student Javi, now a volunteer firefighter, had physically dragged him to the annual chili cookoff that afternoon, teasing him that if he spent one more weekend alone restoring rusted tractor parts in his garage, he’d turn into scrap metal himself. Rudy had grumbled the whole drive over, but he’d brought a dozen oatmeal raisin cookies Linda had taught him to bake, mostly out of habit.
He was leaning against a splintered oak tree, half-finished bowl of three-alarm chili in one hand, when a golden retriever came tearing past, a seven-year-old in a fireman costume hot on its heels. He stepped back to avoid getting bowled over, and his shoulder collided solidly with someone standing just behind him. A cup of spiced cider sloshed over the rim, splattering his flannel shirt and the front of the other person’s cream knit sweater.
He sputtered an apology, leaning down to grab the cup that had fallen to the grass, and when he straightened up, he was inches from her face. She was 58, he’d learn later, silver streaks threading through her dark braid, crinkles fanning out from the corners of her hazel eyes when she laughed instead of pulling away. Her hand had landed on his forearm to steady herself when they collided, and he could feel faint calluses on her fingertips through the worn fabric of his shirt, calluses from restoring old book spines, she’d tell him later. The air between them smelled like cinnamon, lavender, and hickory smoke curling off the cookoff grills, and for a beat, neither of them moved.
“Nah, don’t sweat it,” she said, wiping a fleck of cider off his cheek with the pad of her thumb before she seemed to think better of it, pulling her hand back like she’d touched a hot stove. “Stain matches the chili splotch you’ve got right above your belt buckle anyway. I’m Maren. Just moved here three months ago, working part time at the town library.”
Rudy froze. He hadn’t felt a spark like that since he’d first asked Linda out to a drive-in movie in 1983, and the guilt hit him like a punch to the gut. He’d spent 8 years convincing himself that even looking at another woman that way was a betrayal, that he owed Linda the rest of his life alone. He mumbled his name, avoided eye contact, started to step away, but she didn’t let him leave that easy.
She told him she’d picked up a 1920s cast iron book press at an estate sale a month prior, seized up so bad she couldn’t get the plate to move an inch. Asked if he knew anyone who could fix it, offered to pay in homemade peach pie, the kind with a crumb top, just like the ones Linda used to bake every August when their peach tree was heavy with fruit. The mention of the pie made his chest tight, and he hesitated so long she smiled, waved him off, told him no pressure if he was busy, left him with a slip of paper with the library’s hours scrawled on it before she walked off to find her grandkid, who was now covered in chili from head to toe.
He spent the rest of the cookoff half listening to Javi ramble about fire station drama, turning that slip of paper over in his hand until the edges were frayed. He fought with himself the whole drive home, fought the part of him that wanted to show up, that was tired of eating dinner alone every night, tired of only talking to people when he sold a restored tractor part online, tired of feeling like his life ended when Linda’s did.
He showed up at the library that Saturday, a small roll of his favorite wrenches tucked under his arm, too nervous to even make eye contact with the front desk clerk until he heard Maren laugh from behind a stack of old western paperbacks. She looked up, grinned like she’d known he’d come, and clocked out ten minutes later, leading him to her small bungalow on the edge of town, the porch strung with fairy lights and lined with potted succulents.
The book press took him 17 minutes to fix, just a rusted pin holding the plate in place, easy enough to tap out with a small hammer he kept in his roll. She brought out the peach pie while he was wiping his hands on a rag, still warm from the oven, and they ate it at her kitchen table while the afternoon sun streamed through the window, golden and soft, the same bluegrass band that played the cookoff coming through her kitchen radio.
She leaned across the table to grab his empty plate halfway through their second slice, and her shoulder brushed his, warm through the fabric of their shirts. She paused, didn’t pull away, and looked up at him, her hazel eyes soft. “You talked about Linda at the cookoff, you know. When you rambled about how she taught you to bake those oatmeal raisin cookies. She sounds like she was the kind of person who’d yell at you for sitting at home alone all weekend.”
The words hit him like a weight he didn’t know he was carrying falling off his shoulders. He didn’t say anything for a long minute, just reached out, brushed a strand of hair that had fallen loose from her braid behind her ear, his fingers grazing her cheek. She leaned into the touch, warm and soft, and for the first time in 8 years, he didn’t feel guilty for wanting to be there.
They spent the rest of the afternoon on her couch, flipping through her collection of first edition western paperbacks, the ones he’d checked out of the library every week as a kid, their knees pressed tight together under a knit blanket. When she passed him a tattered copy of *The Virginian* and their fingers laced together for half a beat before he took the book, he didn’t feel an ounce of guilt, just the quiet, warm weight of something he thought he’d never get to feel again.
