Silas Marlow, 58, spends 40 hours a week sanding bamboo blanks and wrapping silk thread around fly rod guides in his cinder block garage outside Boone, North Carolina. He hasn’t taken a day off in seven years, not since Eileen, his wife of 26 years, died in her sleep halfway through her second round of chemo. His only consistent social interaction is the 10 minute chat he has with the cashier at the hardware store every Tuesday, and he’s fine with that—at least, that’s what he tells himself when he eats frozen meatloaf for dinner alone every night. He only showed up to the town’s annual summer bluegrass festival because his former fishing partner left a folding chair and a cold six pack of Pabst on his front porch at 2 p.m., with a note scrawled in Sharpie: Don’t be a hermit. The Soggy Bottom Boys are playing.
He’s two beers in, half listening to the band rip through a fast fiddle track, when a 70 pound golden retriever squeezes between his chair and the one to his right, her wet, grass-stained nose nudging the back of his wrist. He jumps a little, then laughs when the dog licks his knuckle, tail thumping so hard it rattles the leg of his chair.
“Mabel, quit harassing strangers,” a woman says, leaning over to tug the dog back by her collar. Her forearm brushes Silas’s bare bicep, warm and sun-warmed, and he catches a whiff of lavender laundry soap and crushed clover. She’s 54, he guesses, with streaks of silver in her chestnut braid, a faint scar snaking along her left cheekbone, and calloused fingers wrapped around the dog’s collar. She’s wearing cutoff jean shorts and a faded animal rescue hoodie, no makeup, and when she grins at him in apology, her hazel eyes crinkle at the corners like she laughs a lot.
He tells her it’s no problem, he’s always liked dogs, used to have a yellow lab that followed him and Eileen on every fishing trip up until the dog passed two years before Eileen did. She sits back down, Mabel curled at her feet now, and says she recognizes his name—her little brother ordered a custom trout rod from him back in 2018, still talks about it like it’s a holy relic.
They talk over the next set, leaning in close to hear each other over the music, their knees knocking every time one of them shifts to grab a drink. He offers her a beer from his cooler, their fingers brushing when she takes it, and he feels a jolt low in his gut he hasn’t felt since he was 19 and kissing Eileen for the first time in the back of his dad’s pickup. Part of him wants to pack up his chair and leave right then, guilt coiling tight in his chest—like talking to another woman, laughing with her, is some kind of betrayal to the wife he buried seven years ago. The other part of him doesn’t want to stop talking, not ever. She tells him she runs the local animal rescue, adopted Mabel after she was found wandering the side of the highway with a broken leg, that the scar on her cheek is from a car crash her senior year of college, when she fell asleep at the wheel driving home for spring break. He tells her about Eileen, about closing the fly shop, about how he still buys her favorite peaches from the farmers market every Saturday even though he doesn’t like peaches that much.
The band slows down then, striking up the first chords of the old waltz he and Eileen used to dance to in their kitchen at 2 a.m. after too much cheap wine, and he tenses up so hard his jaw aches. She notices, her hand brushing his knee for half a second before she pulls back, asking if he’s okay. He tells her the truth, that he thought he’d never hear that song outside of his old record collection, that he feels stupid for even being here, like he’s doing something wrong.
She nods, soft, and holds out her hand. Her palm is rough, calloused from hauling dog crates and clipping leash snaps, a small scar across her thumb from a cat scratch last month. “We don’t have to do any fancy twirls,” she says, nodding at the open grass in front of the stage where a dozen other couples are swaying. “We can just stand there. Mabel can be our chaperone.”
He hesitates for three full beats, that guilt still nipping at the back of his throat, then he takes her hand. She smells like clover and beer when she steps close, her hand resting light on his shoulder, his hand on her waist, and they sway slow to the music, Mabel sitting at their feet chewing on a dandelion stem. No one stares, no one says anything, and for the first time in seven years, the guilt doesn’t feel like it’s going to swallow him whole. It just feels like Eileen is somewhere laughing at him for taking so long to stop being an idiot.
When the song ends, he doesn’t let go of her hand right away. She looks up at him, the fairy lights strung above the stage catching the gold flecks in her eyes, and she grins. He asks her if she wants to get peach pie at the diner down the street after the show, says he knows they let dogs sit on the patio. She says yes, as long as he lets her pay for the pie. Mabel barks, loud and sharp, like she’s casting a vote in favor.
