Dale Holloway, 58, retired utility lineman, leans against the splintered pine pole of the volunteer fire department’s beer tent, calloused left hand curled around a sweating Miller Lite, right balancing a grease-stained paper plate of fried walleye and coleslaw. He’d avoided the annual fish fry for 11 straight years, still stinging from the mess of his divorce, the way half the town took his ex-wife’s side without asking for his version of events. He only showed up tonight because his 7-year-old grandson had marched in the junior firefighter parade, plastic helmet askew, waving a tiny American flag. The air smells like charcoal, fried batter, and damp clover from the fairground field, the distant twang of a cover band working through a 90s country hit drifting over the crowd of families and old timers milling between tents.
He spots her halfway through his second beer. Lila Marlow, 38, his ex-wife’s niece, the woman he’d spent a decade blaming for lying under oath about his drinking during the divorce proceedings. She’s leaning against the food truck counter, laughing at something the fire chief said, her sun-streaked brown hair pulled back in a loose braid, cut-off jean shorts showing the faint scar on her left knee he remembered her getting when she fell off his four-wheeler when she was 12. His jaw tightens. He’s got half a mind to dump his half-eaten plate in the trash and head for his beat-up F-150 before she sees him, but she turns her head then, locks eyes with him across the crowd, and her smile softens instead of dropping like he expected.
She crosses the field in 10 long strides, stopping so close the toe of her white canvas sneaker is half an inch from his scuffed work boot. She’s holding a can of cherry seltzer, and when she lifts a hand to swat a mosquito off his bare forearm, her cool knuckles brush his sun-warmed skin, and he flinches before he can stop himself. No one who isn’t his grandson or his primary care doctor has touched him in three years, not since the woman he’d been seeing for six months moved to Florida to be closer to her grandkids. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says, her voice lower than he remembers, no edge to it, no snark. He grunts, shifts his weight, avoids her eyes. “Figured you’d still be mad at me,” she adds, and that makes him look up, sharp.
The resentment sits hot in his throat for all of two seconds before she says she never testified at the divorce. Her mom, his ex-wife’s sister, had lied about that, forged her signature on the statement, because she thought Lila was too soft on him, that she’d always had a stupid little schoolgirl crush on the guy who fixed her bike every summer and took her fishing when her own dad was off working the oil rigs in North Dakota. Dale blinks, his grip on the beer can loosening so much a little sloshes over the edge onto his wrist. He’d carried that anger for 11 years, cut off every member of her family, missed half his daughter’s holiday dinners because they’d be there, and none of it was even her fault.
She nods her head toward the tree line at the edge of the fairground, where the string lights don’t reach, the crickets chirping loud enough to drown out most of the crowd noise. He hesitates, glances over his shoulder to make sure none of the guys he used to climb poles with are watching, then follows her, his boots crunching on the dry, crabgrass-dusted dirt. They stop under a big old oak tree, the same one he used to sit under to drink beer after work when he was first married, and she leans back against the trunk, her shoulder pressing against his bicep when he stops next to her. He can smell coconut sunscreen and the faint, sweet scent of her lavender shampoo, hear her breath catching a little when he doesn’t move away.
He expects her to make a bold move, to say something loud or teasing, but she just talks for 20 minutes, tells him she moved back to town three months ago to take care of her mom, who’s got late-stage COPD, that she’s working as a traveling physical therapist, that she’d asked his daughter about him a dozen times over the years but was always too scared to reach out. He finds himself telling her things he hasn’t told anyone, about the panic attacks he had in the year after the divorce, about how he cried in his truck for 20 minutes after his grandson was born, about how he still keeps the old polaroid of her holding the 2-pound bass she caught on his boat when she was 13 taped to the inside of his work toolbox. The tension shifts, slow, warm, not the sharp anger he’s carried for so long, something softer, something he thought he’d forgotten how to feel.
She tucks her hand into his, calloused from lifting patients, a little smaller than his, and asks if he wants to drive her to the old lake overlook after the fry ends, watch the sunset paint the sky pink and tangerine over the water. He squeezes her hand once, nods, takes a sip of his now-warm beer, and doesn’t even glance back at the crowd behind them.
