Clay Bennett, 58, retired high-voltage lineman with a scar snaking up his left forearm from a 2017 transformer blow, had avoided every town community event for four years straight, ever since his wife Sue lost her fight with ovarian cancer. His only consistent social outing was a Tuesday night poker game with three other retired guys from the power company, so when his buddy Ron dragged him to the fire department’s summer barbecue fundraiser, he’d planned to grab two beers, hide by the cooler for 45 minutes, and bolt back to his quiet ranch house with his hound dog, Mabel.
The air reeked of charred hamburger patties, citronella candles, and the sweet, fermented tang of sun-warmed apple cider donuts stacked on a folding table by the bounce house. Kids screamed so loud his ears rang, and he’d just stuffed his work-gloved hand into the ice chest for a Coors Banquet when another hand brushed his, cold knuckles grazing his, a faint callus on the index finger catching on the frayed edge of his glove. He yanked his hand back like he’d touched a live wire, and looked up to see Mara Carter, 54, the county public health nurse everyone in town had gossiped about nonstop through 2020 and 2021.
He’d avoided her on purpose for two years. He’d been the guy yelling at her through the pharmacy drive-thru window when she’d told him to put a mask on before picking up Sue’s chemo nausea meds, called her a power-hungry bureaucrat, left before she could say a word back. He’d felt like garbage about it 10 minutes later, but he was too stubborn to apologize, too wrapped up in his own anger and fear to acknowledge she was just doing her job.
She laughed, low and rough, like she smoked a pack a day on her back porch after work, and didn’t pull her hand away from the cooler. “Took me long enough to catch you in public,” she said, grabbing a lime seltzer from the ice, wiping the condensation off on her faded cutoffs. She wore scuffed steel toe boots, a faded 1984 Born in the USA tour tee, no makeup, sun freckles spattered across her nose, a thick streak of gray running through the messy braid slung over her shoulder. He noticed a tiny lightning bolt tattoo peeking out from the edge of her leather wristband.
He mumbled a half-assed apology for the drive-thru incident, stared at the dirt at his boots, expected her to roll her eyes and walk away. Instead she leaned against the cooler, her shoulder six inches from his, close enough he could smell coconut shampoo and faint menthol cigarette smoke on her, and said she remembered that day, had seen the oncology clinic tag sticking out of his grocery bag, knew he was going through hell, had never held it against him.
The admission made his chest tight, the way no one had bothered to give him that kind of grace back then, everyone too busy picking sides over mask mandates and vaccine cards to ask why a guy was screaming at a nurse through a car window. They drifted away from the crowd, sat on the tailgate of his beat up 2008 F150 parked at the edge of the field, far enough the kids’ screams faded to background noise. He told her about Sue, about the last six months of her life when he’d slept on the hospital couch, about how he’d hated every person who told him what to do back then, because no one could tell him how to make his wife not die. She told him she’d moved to town six months prior, left her ex-husband, a state trooper who’d spent the entire pandemic calling her a tyrant for enforcing rules he refused to follow, that she’d gotten the lightning bolt tattoo after she’d spent three weeks driving 12 hour days to give shots to homebound elderly folks in the hills, got caught in a thunderstorm on a dirt road, thought for a minute she was gonna get struck.
Their knees knocked when she shifted to pull a pack of cigarettes out of her back pocket, and he didn’t move away. She lit one, held the pack out to him, he shook his head, he’d quit when Sue got sick. She exhaled a cloud of smoke up toward the pink and orange streaked sky, and when a piece of ash fell off her cigarette onto the shoulder of his faded gray flannel, she reached over to brush it off, her palm warm through the thin fabric, lingering for two full beats before she pulled her hand back. He didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away, just held eye contact with her, the way he hadn’t held eye contact with anyone who wasn’t his poker buddies in four years.
She asked him if he wanted to get pancakes at the 24-hour diner off the interstate tomorrow morning, said she’d buy, as long as he promised not to yell at her for wearing a mask if the diner was crowded. He laughed, a real laugh, the kind he hadn’t let out since Sue died, and said he’d even wear a mask himself if she wanted. She scrawled her phone number on a napkin printed with the fire department’s logo, pressed it into his palm, her fingers curling around his for a second before she hopped off the tailgate.
She waved as she climbed into her beat up Subaru Outback with a “Protect Our Public Lands” sticker on the back bumper, pulled out of the grass parking lot in a cloud of dust. He sat on the tailgate for 10 minutes after she left, holding the crumpled napkin in his hand, sipping his now warm beer, Mabel’s head in his lap where she’d wandered over from the back seat. A firefly landed on the edge of his work boot, blinked twice, then drifted off toward the tree line.
