Clay Bennett is 58, retired high-voltage lineman, 32 years crawling up power poles in blizzards and thunderstorms for Pennsylvania Power & Light, moved to east Tennessee after his wife Diane died seven years prior. His biggest flaw is he’s stubborn to a fault, has written off every potential romantic connection in his small lake town as “too much drama, too many shared exes,” spends most Friday nights drinking cheap draft at the VFW, brings homemade dill pickles brined with garlic and dill from his garden to every potluck, mans the VFW’s charity burger stand every year at the county fair.
The first time he spots her that night, it’s 45 minutes after sunset, the air thick enough to sip, sweet with fried Oreo grease and cut alfalfa from the field adjacent to the fairgrounds. A country cover band in the beer tent is belting an off-key version of a 90s Garth Brooks track, and the ferris wheel’s hydraulics hiss every time it slows to let passengers off. He recognizes her immediately: Mara Hale, 54, the new county health inspector everyone’s been bitching about for 12 months straight, the one who shut down three food stands last year for expired food handlers’ permits and a single mouse dropping in a popcorn bin. The guys at the VFW call her the Dragon Lady, say she gets off on ruining small business owners’ summers.
She’s not wearing her official neon vest and clipboard, just a faded slate linen button down rolled to the elbows, frayed dark jeans, scuffed work boots caked with red mud from the fair parking lot. There’s a smudge of powdered sugar on the left side of her jaw, like she snuck a funnel cake before she walked over. She stands closer to the counter than any customer all night, shoulder almost brushing the edge of the sneeze guard, yells over the roar of the tilt-a-whirl and a group of teens screaming on the drop tower to order a cheeseburger, extra pickles, no onion.
Clay nods, grills the patty extra crispy like he prefers himself, slides it onto a soft sesame bun, squirts yellow mustard in a zig zag, piles three thick dill slices on top. When he hands the wrapped burger across the counter, their fingers brush. He’s surprised first by the calluses, thick rough ridges across her palm and the pads of her fingers, not the soft, well-manicured hands he expected from a bureaucrat. She catches him staring, smirks, holds eye contact for two full beats longer than polite, says “Spent 11 years on line crew for Akron Public Utilities before I switched to inspections. Climbed more poles than half the guys you drink with at the VFW, I’d bet.”
He blinks, doesn’t know what to say. He’s spent the last six months talking shit about her with the guys, agreeing she was a power-hungry pain in the ass, and now he’s staring at her calloused hands, the faint scar across her left eyebrow that looks exactly like the one he got when a transformer sparked 20 years back, singed the hair off half his face and left a permanent thin white line above his own eye.
She leans against the counter, takes a bite of the burger, moans soft enough only he can hear it, says this is the best food she’s had all week. She tells him the reason she cracked down on the stands last year was a 7 year old kid got E. coli from an unlicensed taco stand the summer before, spent three days in the ICU, the parents didn’t want to press charges or make a fuss because the taco stand owner was their next-door neighbor. She didn’t tell anyone the backstory, didn’t want to look like a hero, just did her job so no other kid got hurt.
Clay nods, wipes his hands on his grease-stained navy apron, feels stupid for all the crap he’s said about her over cheap beer at the VFW. He steps out from behind the counter when his shift ends 20 minutes later, tells her he’ll buy her a fried Twinkie if she promises not to cite the stand for the loose tile by the deep fryer. She laughs, a rough, throaty sound like she smokes menthols when she’s stressed, says she’ll let it slide if he splits the Twinkie with her.
They walk over to the Twinkie stand, their shoulders brushing every other step, the noise of the fair fading a little as they get closer to the lake edge. There’s powdered sugar on her lip when she takes a bite of the warm, crispy Twinkie, and before he can think better of it, he swipes it off with his thumb. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away, just leans into the touch a fraction, her dark eyes warm when she looks up at him, and for a second he swears he can smell coconut shampoo and faint cigarette smoke on her hair.
He tells her about Diane, about how he moved down here because she always talked about retiring to a lake house, about how he hasn’t been on a date since she died, hasn’t even wanted to, thought that part of his life was over. She tells him about her ex husband, who left her for a 28 year old yoga instructor and moved to Sarasota four years prior, about how she stopped trying to date because every guy in the county either hated her for her job or thought she was too intimidating to ask out.
They sit on a weathered wooden bench half-hidden by oak trees, watching the fair’s neon pink and blue lights bounce off the dark, rippling surface of the lake, their knees pressed together the whole time, no space between them. The air is cooler now, carries the faint smell of pine from the woods on the other side of the lake, the distant pop of firecrackers some teens set off in the far corner of the parking lot.
Clay asks her if she likes blueberry pancakes. He says he has a bush full of ripe, sweet blueberries in his yard, picks a handful every morning, makes pancakes from scratch with buttermilk every Saturday. He says he could make her a stack, no strings attached, if she wants to come over.
She smiles, nods, says she’d like that a lot. She stands up, brushes bits of grass off the back of her jeans, laces her fingers through his for three slow steps as they walk back toward the fairgrounds, only letting go to step over a gnarled oak root sticking up out of the dirt path.
