He smells jasmine first, sharp and sweet over the odor of grilled brats and coconut sunscreen, before he hears her voice. “Henderson. You still wear that beat-up Stetson even when it’s 85 degrees out? You gonna get heat stroke one of these days and I’m not driving you to the ER.” He looks up, and his chest tightens. Mara Carter is 52, runs a horse rescue 40 minutes outside town, and was his wife Lila’s best friend for 30 years, the woman who’d been maid of honor at their wedding, who’d held Lila’s hair back when she had chemo, who he’d barely spoken to since the funeral. She’s wearing faded denim cutoffs, scuffed roping boots, a linen button-down tied at the waist that shows a sliver of sun-tanned skin at her hip, and a tiny silver hoop in her left nostril he doesn’t remember her having. She stops two feet away, her hips tilted, grinning so the faint scar on her upper lip pulls tight, the same scar she got when she face-planted on a river rock on their 2001 rafting trip, the one that made Lila snort-laugh so loud a great blue heron took off from the bank 100 yards away.
She leans in for a hug before he can overthink it, her shoulder brushing his bare forearm, the heat of her skin seeping through the thin cotton of her shirt. Her hair smells like jasmine and horse liniment, so familiar it makes the back of his throat burn. She drops onto the picnic bench next to him, her knee pressing against his when she shifts to set her own beer down, and he freezes for half a second before he forces himself to relax. She asks about the old 1978 Ford F-150 he was restoring last time they spoke, and he finds himself rambling about the new carburetor he put in last month, the way it purrs now when he takes it up into the mountains to watch the sunset. She laughs at his story about accidentally dropping a socket into the transmission pan, and when she swats his arm to make a point, her palm lingers on his bicep for three beats too long, the callus on the side of her hand rough against his skin, a reminder of the 12 hours a day she spends lifting hay bales and roping spooked rescue horses.
The guilt hits him then, sharp and cold, and he shifts an inch away from her, his jaw tight. This is wrong. Lila was her best friend. He’d spent seven years shutting down every woman who tried to ask him out, convinced dating again would be a betrayal, that it would erase the 28 years he’d had with his wife. But Mara doesn’t look at him like he’s a broken widower, like he needs to be fixed or coddled. She looks at him like he’s just Cole, the guy who used to sneak her extra slices of pecan pie at Thanksgiving, who once helped her rescue a foal stuck in a ravine in the middle of a snowstorm. She holds eye contact longer than is casual, her dark eyes crinkling at the corners when he teases her about still burning the edges of her famous peach cobbler, and he feels that jolt low in his gut he hasn’t felt since before Lila got sick, half shame, half unnameable excitement.
The sun dips below the roofline of the downtown buildings as the crowd thins, string lights strung between the oak trees flicker on, casting soft gold over the half-empty picnic tables. She mentions she brought a cooler in her truck, that she’s got a six pack of the exact IPA he’s drinking, and a cobbler she baked that morning that only has slightly burnt edges. “I live 20 minutes up the road,” she says, leaning in so her breath fans across his ear, and he can smell the beer on her breath, sweet and hoppy. “Porch has a view of the whole valley. No one’s gonna bother us. Lila called me six months before she died, you know. Told me if I didn’t make a move on you after she was gone, she’d haunt both of our asses for the rest of our lives. I waited. You were too busy being stubborn to notice.”
The last of his resistance crumbles then, the old disgust at the idea of moving on warring with the quiet, warm relief of being seen, of being wanted by someone who knew every part of his life, who didn’t need him to explain the empty spot next to him at every holiday dinner, who’d grieved Lila just as hard as he did. He doesn’t say anything, just reaches out, brushes a stray strand of dark hair off her face, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her cheek, and she leans into the touch, her eyes fluttering shut for half a second.
They stand there for a minute, quiet, listening to the distant cover band wrap up their set, the crickets starting to chirp in the oak trees, the faint sound of a kid laughing a block over. She takes his hand, her calloused fingers threading through his, and squeezes once, hard enough to let him know she’s not going anywhere if he doesn’t want her to. He squeezes back, and when she turns to walk toward the parking lot, he follows her, the rough gravel crunching under his work boots as they cross the empty square.
