Clay Bennett, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service wildfire crew lead, has occupied the same scuffed vinyl corner booth at the Asheville-area VFW’s Friday fish fry for seven years, ever since his wife Linda lost her two-year fight with breast cancer. He lives alone in the cedar cabin they built together in 1998, spends most weekdays sanding rust off the 1972 Ford F-100 he’s restoring, and has stuck to one ironclad rule for 20 years: no messing around with a friend’s ex, no exceptions. The rule came to be after he hooked up with Jimmie Carter’s then-girlfriend after a crew party in 2003, a stupid, beer-fueled mistake that ended with Jimmie breaking his jaw and Clay carrying a faint, silvery scar along his jawline to this day.
The July air in the VFW hall is thick with the smell of fried catfish, hushpuppies, and cheap draft beer, sweet tea puddled in sticky rings across every Formica table. He’s wiping fry grease off his calloused, scarred fingers with a crumpled paper napkin, boots propped on the empty seat across from him, half-empty Coors Banquet sweating into a cardboard coaster, when Mara Carter slips on a puddle of spilled tea three feet from his booth. She catches herself on the edge of his table, her palm landing warm and firm on his knee, right above the frayed cuff of his work-worn Carhartt pants.
She laughs, breathless, as he steadies her by the elbow, her skin soft under his calloused grip. She’s 54, Jimmie’s ex-wife, moved back to town six months prior to fix up the cottage her mom left her, and Clay’s gone out of his way to avoid her every time she’s showed up at the fish fry to help bus tables or run the register. Jimmie left town 12 years ago for a forest service job in Idaho, divorced Mara eight years back, and no one local has heard from him in three years, but Clay’s stupid rule still hums in the back of his head like a faulty smoke alarm.
She asks if she can take the empty seat across from him, and he doesn’t say no, even as that little voice in his head screams he’s playing with fire. She smells like lavender perfume, the exact scent Linda used to complain smelled too “hippie dippie” whenever they passed the downtown candle shop, and she’s wearing faded cutoff denim shorts and a threadbare Dolly Parton tee, silver hoops catching the fluorescent light overhead when she leans in to ask if he’s the guy everyone says can fix just about anything with a hammer and a level.
She tells him her gutters are leaking, her back porch rail is rotted through, and every roofer in a 20-mile radius is booked three months out. She’d asked the local mechanic for his number, she says, and he’d told her Clay would probably help out for the cost of a six pack and a home cooked meal. Clay’s first instinct is to say no, to make up an excuse about working on the truck all weekend, but her knee brushes his under the table, soft and intentional, and he can smell mint gum mixed with fry grease on her breath when she talks, her hazel eyes flecked with gold crinkling at the corners like she already knows he’s going to say yes.
He shows up at her cottage at 10 a.m. the next Saturday, ladder strapped to the bed of his work truck, tool belt slung low on his hips. The cottage is tucked between two oak trees at the edge of town, wild blackberry bushes climbing up the side of the foundation, and she meets him on the porch barefoot, wearing a faded Grateful Dead tee, toenails painted cherry red, holding a mason jar of sweet tea so cold it’s sweating through the paper wrap around the outside.
He fixes the gutters in 45 minutes, replaces the rotted porch rail slats in another hour, and she insists he stay for lunch, then iced tea on the back porch while the sun dips low over the Blue Ridge Mountains. He’s halfway through a piece of peach pie she baked that morning when she leans across the porch rail, her thumb brushing the faint scar on his jawline. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away, even when she says she always knew that fight with Jimmie was stupid, that Jimmie had cheated on her twice before that party even happened, that he hasn’t so much as sent a text asking how she’s doing in four years.
The crickets are chirping loud enough to drown out the distant hum of a lawnmower down the street, the sky bleeding pink and orange over the ridgeline, when she admits she’d intentionally spilled that tea at the fish fry just to have an excuse to talk to him. He laughs, the sound rusty from disuse, and leans in to kiss her before he can overthink it, her lips soft, tasting like peach and mint, no rush, no guilt clinging to the edge of the moment like he expected.
He stays until the porch light clicks on automatically at dusk, walks her to her front door, and when she asks him to come back Sunday to help her stain the new porch rail, he says yes without hesitation. He drives home with the windows rolled down, the warm mountain air tangling in his graying hair, and sets his tool belt on his front porch when he pulls into his driveway. He grabs the can of cedar stain from his garage shelf, and sets it by the front door so he won’t forget it in the morning.
