Clay Hargrove is 58, retired U.S. Forest Service firefighter, now builds custom live-edge furniture out of his two-car garage outside Asheville. His worst flaw, per his old crew, is that he holds loyalty like a lit stick of dynamite: squeeze too tight, and it blows up whatever good might be standing right in front of him. He’s avoided dating entirely since his wife Lori died of breast cancer seven years prior, convinced even a casual coffee with another woman is a betrayal of the 28 years they had. He’s also avoided Elara Voss, his old fire captain’s widow, for the two years since Jim died of a heart attack on a fishing trip. Unwritten crew rule, etched into every guy’s head the first day on shift: you don’t look at another man’s wife, especially not the captain’s, not even long enough to pass her a beer at a cookout.
He’s leaned against a splintered cedar post at the county fair’s craft beer tent when he spots her, late August air thick with the smell of fried Oreos, cut hay, and diesel from the tractor pulling the hayride. The cold IPA in his hand sweats through the koozie Lori stitched for him before she got sick, damp against his calloused palm. Elara’s wearing high-waisted cutoff denim, scuffed white work boots, and a linen button-down tied at the waist, freckles dark across her nose from hours working in the community garden she runs. She laughs at the ring toss barker’s bad joke, head tilted back, and Clay’s first instinct is to turn and walk the other way, back to his truck, back to the quiet of his garage where he doesn’t have to fight the stupid, unnameable pull he’s felt toward her for as long as he’s known her.
She sees him before he can move, waves, and cuts through the crowd of kids chasing each other with glow sticks. She gets within a foot of him, close enough that he can smell coconut sunscreen and the faint, sweet tang of cherry lip gloss, and her bare shoulder brushes his bicep when she leans in to yell over the roar of the Ferris wheel’s generator. “Thought you hated crowds,” she says, grinning, and her teeth are bright white, a small chip in the left incisor from a softball game back in 2012 that he remembers clear as day. He grunts, holds up his beer, and says he only came to drop off three cutting boards he entered in the craft contest, was just about to leave. She holds out a paper cone of fried cheese curds, still steaming, and when he takes one, their fingers brush, a sharp, warm jolt that runs all the way up his arm to the base of his skull.
His ears burn, and he feels a hot twist of guilt in his gut, like he just stole something off Jim’s front porch. He’s halfway through making an excuse about needing to feed his hound dog when she nods at the Ferris wheel, its lights blinking pink and blue against the darkening sky. “Haven’t ridden that since Jim took me our third date,” she says, picking a crumb of fried batter off her thumb. “C’mon. I won’t make you talk about your feelings if you don’t make me listen to you complain about how the fair’s beer isn’t as good as it was 10 years ago.” He hesitates for 10 full seconds, then nods, because he can’t think of a single good reason to say no that doesn’t sound like the coward’s excuse it is.
The Ferris wheel car rocks when they climb in, and there’s not enough room for both of them to sit without their knees pressing together, denim on denim. He can feel the heat of her calf against his even through the fabric of his jeans. The car creaks as it climbs, and when it hits the very top, it lurches to a stop, stuck for the standard 60 seconds so couples can kiss, so people can take photos of the valley stretched out below them, dotted with fireflies and the distant glow of porch lights in the hills. She turns to him, and her hand rests light on his knee, and he freezes, half convinced he’s hallucinating. “I know why you’ve been avoiding me,” she says, quiet enough no one else can hear. “Jim told me, before he died. Said you were the most loyal son of a bitch he ever met, that if anything ever happened to him, you’d check on me, but you’d be too stubborn to do it unless I cornered you first. Said both of us were too busy being loyal to ghosts to stop being lonely.”
The guilt twists again, but this time it’s softer, not sharp enough to hurt. He stares at her hand on his knee, then up at her face, and he doesn’t pull away when she brushes a strand of graying hair off his forehead, her thumb brushing his cheekbone for half a second. “Lori used to tell me I needed to stop treating rules like they were written in stone,” he says, and his voice is rougher than he expects it to be. She smiles, and the car lurches again, starting its slow descent back to the ground.
When they step off the ride, she laces her fingers through his, calluses from her gardening tools rough against his own, and doesn’t let go. They walk toward the fried peach pie stand, and she laughs when a kid runs past them holding a cone of cotton candy bigger than his head, nearly tripping over his own feet. Clay squeezes her hand once, slow, and doesn’t look over his shoulder to see if any of his old crew are watching.
