Elias Voss, 62, spent the last three years holed up in his garage woodshop, only leaving to run grocery runs or drop off custom cutting boards for clients who found him through local Facebook groups. He’d retired from his 35-year run as a high school woodshop teacher six months after his wife, Carol, passed from lung cancer, and he’d turned down every invite to cookouts, farmers market trips, or weekly poker games his old coworkers threw his way. His biggest flaw, he’d admit if he ever talked about himself, was that he hated feeling like he was wasting anyone’s time—especially his own, when he could be sanding down a walnut slab or tuning up his 1987 table saw.
He only dragged himself to the downtown farmers market on that 82-degree July Saturday because Marnie Hale, a woman who’d ordered an 18-inch walnut serving board two weeks prior, had asked if he could drop it off at her jam and pickle booth instead of meeting her at the grocery store parking lot as they’d planned. He’d recognized her name immediately. Her daughter, Lila, had been in his 1998 woodshop class, quiet, quick to laugh when a kid’s pine birdhouse fell apart mid-glue up, and Marnie had shown up to every parent-teacher conference in a paint-splattered denim jacket, carrying a Tupperware of chocolate chip cookies for the teachers who stayed late to help her kid with projects. He’d had a stupid, harmless little crush on her back then, the kind he’d never breathed a word of to Carol, the kind that died as soon as she walked out the door to go home to her then-husband.
The booth smelled like cooked strawberries and dill when he walked up, the wooden shelves lined with glass jars sealed with gingham lids, handwritten labels scrawled in cursive. Marnie was leaning over to restock a row of bread and butter pickles when he set the board on the table, and she stood up fast, her shoulder brushing his bicep when she turned. She was 58, he remembered Lila mentioning on a Facebook comment a few months back that her mom had gotten divorced four years prior, and the silver streaks in her auburn braid glinted in the sun, the hem of her sunflower-print cotton dress brushing her calves.
“Wow,” she said, running her fingers over the grain of the walnut, her knuckle brushing his where he still held the edge of the board. Her hand was warm, calloused at the fingertips from lifting heavy canning pots, and he felt a jolt run up his arm that he hadn’t felt since he was 17, fumbling with his prom date’s corsage. He pulled his hand back fast, shoving it in the pocket of his work jeans, suddenly hyper aware of the sawdust on his flannel shirt, the dirt under his fingernails.
He wanted to leave right then, the old guilt twisting in his gut—feeling anything for another woman felt like he was cheating on Carol, like he was erasing the 36 years they’d spent together. But Marnie was already leaning under the table to grab a cold can of lemonade, popping the tab and holding it out to him, her eyes crinkling at the corners when he hesitated. “C’mon,” she said, nodding to the empty folding chair next to her booth. “I’ve got ten minutes before my next shift helper shows up. Lila still talks about that birdhouse you helped her fix, you know. She still has it on her porch in Portland.”
He sat. They talked about Lila, about the way the woodshop used to smell like sawdust and Elmer’s glue, about the time a kid tried to carve a surfboard out of pine and it split in half halfway through the semester. The buzz of the market wrapped around them, kids yelling as they ran past with snow cones, a bluegrass band playing a slow cover of John Prine in the gazebo down the row. When a customer came up to buy three jars of blackberry jam, Marnie leaned over him to grab them from the shelf behind his chair, her hair brushing his cheek, the coconut scent of her shampoo mixing with the jam smell, and he froze, his hands tight around the sweating lemonade can.
When her shift helper showed up, a 16-year-old kid with a nose ring who called her “Ms. Marnie”, she wiped her hands on her dress and asked if he wanted to walk down to the taco truck at the end of the row for a late lunch. He almost said no, the guilt still nipping at him, but then he looked at her, the way she was twisting the edge of her braid like she was nervous too, and he nodded.
They were halfway across the grass when she tripped over a loose curb stone, and he grabbed her waist to steady her, his hand firm against the soft cotton of her dress. She didn’t pull away right away, leaning into his side for a beat, her hand on his forearm, and when she looked up at him, her eyes were dark, no trace of the friendly teacher-parent distance they’d kept 25 years prior. “I asked the market coordinator for your contact info three months ago,” she said, quiet enough that no one passing by could hear. “I didn’t know if you’d want to talk. I always liked you, back then. I just never said anything.”
He exhaled, the tight knot in his chest loosening all at once. He’d spent three years thinking any feeling that wasn’t grief for Carol was a betrayal, but it didn’t feel like that right then. It felt like something Carol would have laughed at, would have pushed him to pursue, would have teased him for taking so long to work up the nerve. “I liked you too,” he said, his voice rougher than he expected. “Never said anything either. Was married. You were married. Seemed stupid.”
She laughed, a warm, throaty sound, and she didn’t move her hand from his forearm. They got tacos, sat on a picnic table by the gazebo, and she told him about how she’d started canning after the divorce, how it was the only thing that kept her busy when Lila moved across the country. He told her about the custom boards, about the stack of maple slabs he had in his garage he was planning to turn into dining tables for a local cafe. When they finished eating, he asked her if she wanted to come back to his shop to see the slabs, and she grinned, holding up a jar of peach jam she’d stuffed in her purse before they left the booth. “I brought this just in case you asked,” she said.
They walked back to his truck parked two blocks over, the sun warm on their backs, and when they stopped at the passenger side, she reached up to tuck a stray piece of oak sawdust that had been stuck to the collar of his flannel since that morning off his shirt, her fingers brushing the skin of his neck.
He unlocked the passenger door for her, and the sound of the latch clicking open felt like the first unclenched breath he’d taken in three years.
