Hank Collier, 58, retired lineman for the Auglaize County electric co-op, has run the beer tent at the New Knoxville summer street fair every year for 19 years straight. He’s got a scar slicing across his left knuckle from the 2019 ice storm, when he spent 14 hours perched on a pole in sub-freezing rain to get a nursing home’s power back, and a habit of pushing people away when they get too close—his ex-wife left him seven years prior, and he’s convinced his calloused hands, tendency to forget to text back, and preference for shooting skeet over dinner parties make him unfit for anything more than casual small talk. The July air hangs thick and damp, heavy with the smell of fried Oreos, cut alfalfa, and the faint diesel fumes of the fair’s tractor pull rig, and the toe of his work boot is sticky with spilled hard seltzer from a group of teens who’d snuck in an hour prior.
He’s wiping down the Formica counter with a ragged dish towel when she steps up to the tent, and he freezes mid-wipe for half a beat before he remembers how to breathe. It’s Lila Mae Carter, 54, his ex-wife’s first cousin, who he hasn’t seen in 12 years, the woman he’d stolen extra pretzels for at his own wedding reception because she’d complained the caterer had run out of salt. She’s got freckles splattered across her nose from working in her native plant nursery down in Athens, a frayed cut-off flannel tied around her waist, and a faint smudge of potting soil on her left jawline, her work boots still caked with mud even at the fair. She orders a hazy IPA, and when he hands it across the counter, her fingertips brush the back of his hand, and he feels a jolt run up his arm that he hasn’t felt since he was 22 and touched a live wire by accident.
His first instinct is to pull away, to make an excuse about having to restock coolers, to avoid the obvious: small town gossip travels faster than the volunteer fire department’s siren, and anyone who sees them talking longer than 30 seconds will have a story about him chasing his ex’s cousin spread across the local Facebook group by sundown. He feels a flicker of disgust at himself for even noticing the way her tank top straps slip down her shoulder when she leans against the counter, for remembering that she hated cilantro and loved George Strait back when they were all in high school. But she leans in closer when he talks about the free wiring work he still does for widows on the west side of town, her elbow brushing his bicep every time she reaches for her drink, her dark eyes locked on his like she actually cares about the story he’s telling about the time a squirrel took out half the town’s power on Christmas Eve.
He hesitates for all of ten seconds, then tells her he’s got a cabin 22 minutes outside of town, no neighbors for a mile in any direction, a porch swing that overlooks the cornfields, and he was gonna stop at the pizza place on the edge of town for a pepperoni pie with extra cheese on the way home. She pauses, her tongue darting out to wet her lower lip, then nods, grinning so wide the crinkles at the corner of her eyes show. He locks up the beer tent, shoves the cash bag in the back of his beat-up 2018 F-150, and holds the passenger door open for her. She slides into the seat, and the smell of her lavender shampoo mixes with the worn leather of the seats and the faint pine scent of the air freshener hanging from the rearview.
He pulls out of the fair parking lot, turning onto the two-lane highway that leads out of town, and she reaches across the center console, resting her hand lightly on his forearm, right where the old, faded scar from his lineman days wraps around his wrist, rubbing her thumb over the raised skin slow and soft. He doesn’t pull away, doesn’t overthink the gossip that’ll spread if anyone sees them, doesn’t worry about whether he’s too rough around the edges for this. The radio cuts on to a George Strait deep cut, the one they’d danced to at his cousin’s wedding back in 1998, and he taps his thumb on the steering wheel in time, the corner of his mouth tugging up into a smile he can’t fight. He slows down when he passes the pizza place, flipping on his turn signal to pull into the lot.
