Cole Henderson, 58, retired high-voltage lineman with a scar snaking up his left forearm from a 2019 line fire, had only come to the 2024 Maplewood Summer Fair to drop off his late wife Linda’s dill pickles for the annual canning contest. He’d planned to be home by 7, eating a frozen meatloaf dinner and watching the Tigers lose, same as every other Saturday for the past three years. The woman running the contest table had winked and said Linda’s dills had taken first place three years running, no one else stood a chance, but he’d just nodded, too awkward to stay and chat. His biggest flaw, one his old crew used to rag on him for nonstop, was that he dug his heels in against any change so hard he’d miss out on good things just to prove he could stick to a plan.
He was tucking the contest entry slip into his flannel shirt pocket when he stepped back and bumped straight into someone, cold iced lavender lemonade sloshing over the rim of a plastic cup to dot the toe of his scuffed work boot. He turned to apologize, and froze. It was Mara Alvarez, 56, the librarian who’d moved to town six months prior, the woman he’d avoided running into for three straight weeks after he’d dropped off a stack of old lineman memoirs to the library and left stammering when she’d smiled at him and asked if he’d written any of the stories down himself.
She laughed, bright and loud over the hum of the fair crowd, and stepped in close enough that he could smell vanilla lotion mixed with the fried dough and charcoal smoke wafting from the food stalls, dabbing at the wet spot on his boot with a crumpled napkin. Her shoulder brushed his chest when she leaned down, and when she stood back up she held eye contact for three full beats longer than casual, no hurry to step back into the polite six inches of space strangers usually kept. She teased him for vanishing from the library, and he mumbled an excuse about fixing the gutters on his buddy’s cabin, half-embarrassed she’d even noticed he was gone.
The conflict coiled tight in his chest the whole time they talked, warring between the guilt that gnawed at him for even sitting next to a woman who wasn’t Linda, and the warm, thrumming desire he hadn’t felt in years, the kind that made his palms sweat a little and made him hang on every word she said. She asked him about the 2015 ice storm, the one that had left half the county without power for 12 days, and he told her about being stuck on a 40-foot pole for three hours in negative 10 degree weather, his gloves frozen solid to the line, and she didn’t interrupt, didn’t say that sounded terrible, just nodded and asked what the view was like from up there when the sun came up over the ice-covered trees. No one had asked him that before, not even Linda.
The first firework boomed overhead right as he finished the story, painting the sky bright red, and she flinched a little, leaning into his side unconsciously, her hand resting right on the scar on his forearm, her palm warm through the thin fabric of his shirt. He froze for half a second, then slowly rested his hand over hers, his calloused fingers brushing her knuckles. He pulled back a second later, apologizing, but she shook her head, her thumb brushing the raised edge of the scar through his shirt. She told him she’d wanted to ask him out for months, but she’d known he was grieving, didn’t want to push. He admitted he’d been scared, that he’d thought wanting to spend time with someone else meant he was betraying Linda’s memory, that he’d spent three years punishing himself for outliving her.
She told him love didn’t work like that, that Linda had obviously loved him enough to want him to stop eating frozen dinners alone every night, to stop turning down invitations to go fishing with his crew, to stop acting like his life ended when hers did. He didn’t say anything for a minute, watching the fireworks burst blue and green over the fairgrounds, the crowd around them cheering. He asked her if she wanted to split a plate of fried Oreos after the show, and she grinned, leaning over to kiss his cheek quick, the lipstick residue warm and soft on his skin.
He laces his fingers through hers, calloused from decades of gripping wrenches and pole rungs, and doesn’t let go when the next firework booms overhead.
