Delmar Pritchard is 62, retired woodshop teacher, spent 31 years teaching surly teens not to lose fingers to table saws before he took his pension three years back. His biggest flaw is he’s spent the decade and a half since his wife left him for a spandex-clad triathlon coach treating casual human connection like a splinter he can dig out before it festers. He sells hand-planed walnut and cherry cutting boards at the Asheville area farmers markets every Saturday, keeps his interactions limited to pricing calls and one-sentence replies to questions about wood grain, leaves as soon as the market closes to avoid the weekly vendor potluck every single week.
This Saturday, he gets held up by a flat tire on his old F-150, so by the time he’s got the spare on, the sun’s dipping low over the Blue Ridge foothills, painting the sky pink and burnt orange, the air thick with the smell of grilled bratwurst, fried green tomatoes, and the sweet, sharp tang of stone fruit. A bluegrass band plays a slow, twangy rendition of *Foggy Mountain Breakdown* near the market entrance, crickets chirping loud enough to cut through the low hum of vendor chatter. He’s stacking the last of his unsold boards in the truck bed when he hears her voice, low and warm, right behind his shoulder.
He’s avoided Lena Marlow for two months straight, ever since she set up her jam and preserve stand two spots down from his. 58, widowed three years after her husband died on a fishing trip off the Outer Banks, she makes 17 different flavors of jam, 12 of which have some variety of hot pepper mixed in, wears cutoff jeans and faded band tees for 70s country bands, and laughed so loud when a kid dropped a jar of her strawberry rhubarb last month that half the market turned to look. Delmar told himself he stayed away because her constant chatter was annoying, but the truth was he’d caught himself staring at the freckles dusting her bare forearms one too many times, felt a twist of something he’d thought was long dead in his chest, and hated himself for it.
She steps close enough now that he can smell lavender hand cream mixed with the faint, sour tang of apple cider vinegar from her canning station, holds out a mason jar of deep purple blackberry habanero jam, the lid still sticky from the label she’d just scribbled on with a Sharpie. When he reaches out to take it, her fingers brush his, his calloused from 40 years of running planers and sanders, hers rough from lifting heavy cases of mason jars and twisting lids until her knuckles ache, and the jolt goes straight up his arm to the base of his skull. He freezes, half-ready to mumble a thank you and climb in his truck and drive away before he does something stupid, but she leans against the side of his truck, crosses her ankles, and smirks like she knows exactly how thrown he is.
She teases him about wearing a long-sleeved flannel even when the humidity’s so thick you can drink it, he teases her back about putting habanero in jam so sweet it makes his teeth hurt. She tells him she burned three batches of jam that week because she got distracted marathoning old John Wayne movies, and he finds himself telling her about the stack of 70s Westerns he’s got on DVD at his house, the way he watches them every night when he’s eating frozen dinners alone. He doesn’t even realize he’s been talking for 20 minutes until a cricket hops on his boot, and he looks down and sees her hand is resting an inch away from his on the truck bed, so close he can feel the heat coming off her skin.
She asks if he wants to come back to her place, test the jam on the sourdough she baked before the market that morning. He hesitates, his first thought the empty bungalow waiting for him, the routine he’s built that never lets him get hurt, the way he hasn’t let anyone inside his personal space for longer than five minutes in years. For a second he feels that familiar twist of disgust at himself for even considering it, for being stupid enough to think he could have something good again, but then she tilts her head and smiles, and he sees the tiny scar above her left eyebrow she told him she got when a 4-H goat headbutted her when she was 12, and he nods before he can talk himself out of it.
He shoves the last of the cutting boards in the back of the truck, locks the tailgate, follows her to her beat-up Subaru parked three rows over. Their shoulders brush every other step, the warm cotton of her t-shirt soft against his bare arm, and he doesn’t flinch away like he usually does when people get too close. She stops to unlock her car door, turns to him, and leans in just far enough that her sun-warmed hair brushes his cheek, and he doesn’t move a muscle.
