Leo Marquez, 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, leans back against the splintered picnic table at the downtown Ashland beer garden and twists the cap off a cold pale ale. He’d stopped by mostly to drop off the hand-carved bluebird house he’d made for the food bank raffle, planned to head home after one drink, avoid the group of PTA moms hovering by the food truck who keep trying to rope him into building new playground planters. The golden hour sun filters through oak trees strung with fairy lights, the bluegrass band on the small stage plucks through a slow, twangy cover of a 1970s country song he hasn’t heard since his wedding.
A woman slides onto the bench across from him, setting a plastic cup of cherry sours down hard enough that a little sloshes over the edge. “Sorry, every other table’s packed,” she says, wiping a drop of red liquid off her wrist with the back of her hand. He recognizes her instantly: Mia Carter, 48, his son’s 10th grade math teacher, the woman he’d nursed a dumb, quiet crush on for two full school years back when his wife was still alive, back when Mia was married, back when he’d thought even looking at her too long was some kind of betrayal. She squints at him for two seconds, then her face lights up. “Wait, you’re Leo, right? You made all those custom cedar pencil holders for my class when the district cut our supply budget. I still have mine on my desk.”
He feels his neck heat up, the scar on his left forearm from a 2018 table saw accident tingling like it always does when he’s flustered. He nods, wiping his palm on the thigh of his faded Carhartt work pants. “Yeah, that’s me. Thought you moved out of town years ago.” She tells him she got divorced last spring, moved back three weeks ago to take over her grandma’s used bookstore on Main Street, the one he used to take his son to for storytime when he was little. She leans forward, elbows on the table, and her bare knee brushes his under the table by accident. She doesn’t yank it away immediately, just holds his eye contact for a beat longer than necessary, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a teasing half smile. She smells like lavender hand lotion and the salted peanuts she’s shoveling into her mouth from a paper bag, the silver hoop in her left ear catching the sun so it glints right into his eyes for half a second.
They talk through the rest of his beer and two more of her cherry sours, the band picking up faster tunes as the sky fades to deep pink. She teases him about the old note he’d slipped in with the pencil holders back then, a dumb joke about how math teachers needed all the help they could get keeping track of their red grading pens. He admits he’d had a crush on her back then, was too much of a coward to say anything, both because he was married and because he thought she was way out of his league. She laughs so hard she snorts, leaning forward even more, her knee pressing solidly against his now, no accident this time. “I had a crush on you too,” she says, quiet enough that only he can hear it over the music. “Thought you were all quiet and gruff and hot, building stuff for kids for free. I wondered why you never stayed to talk longer when you dropped off supplies.”
When the band takes their break, she asks if he wants to walk the block over to the bookstore to see the space, says she’s been trying to figure out how to build built-in bookshelves for the kids’ corner and could use his opinion. He agrees before he even thinks about it. On the walk over, their hands brush twice as they step around a group of kids chasing a golden retriever down the sidewalk, and on the third pass he laces his fingers through hers. Her palm is warm, a little calloused at the fingertips from turning thousands of book pages, she squeezes his hand once like she’s been waiting for him to make the first move.
The back porch of the bookstore overlooks the small creek that runs through downtown, strung with the same kind of fairy lights as the beer garden. She pours them both glasses of iced peach tea from a sweating pitcher on the porch rail, sits down next to him on the weathered swing, her shoulder pressing solidly into his. She tilts her face up to look at him, and he kisses her slow, no rush, she tastes like cherry sours and sugar and peach tea, her hand coming up to rest on the scar on his forearm, her thumb rubbing slow circles over the raised, rough skin.
