Clay Bennett is 58, retired TVA lineman, 18 years sober, widowed three years come October. He’s got a scar zig-zagging across his left eyebrow from a 2007 pole fall, and a habit of holding grudges so long he forgets what started them half the time. He’s parked at the VFW Friday fish fry like he is every week, plastic plate heaped with catfish and hushpuppies, sweating through the back of his faded Lynyrd Skynyrd tee while a group of retired Marines yells about last season’s Alabama game two tables over. The air smells like fryer grease, cut grass, and cheap domestic beer, crickets humming loud enough to cut through the old country playing over the crackling speakers.
He’s wiping a smudge of tartar sauce off his work jeans when she stumbles into him. She trips over a half-buried cooler leg, iced tea sloshing over the rim of her plastic cup onto his bare forearm, cold and sticky, her hip pressing hard into his thigh as she catches herself. He’s about to snap a gruff warning when he looks down, and his throat goes tight. It’s Mara. His late wife’s little sister, the woman he’s blamed for 19 years for talking Ellie into leaving him back when he was drinking too much to remember his own name. He hasn’t seen her since she moved to Portland two weeks after Ellie came back home.
She’s shorter than he remembers, auburn hair cut sharp to her chin, a tiny silver stud glinting in her left nostril, freckles spread across her nose like someone flicked paint at her. She’s wearing a loose linen button down, unbuttoned two buttons at the collar, cutoff denim shorts, scuffed white work boots caked with mud. She blinks, recognizes him, and laughs, low and warm, the same laugh she had when she was 16 and snuck into Ellie and Clay’s wedding reception to steal a slice of cake. “Shit, Clay, I’m so sorry. That cooler came out of nowhere.”
She doesn’t wait for an invitation to sit, plopping down on the bench next to him so close her knee brushes his every time she shifts. He can smell lavender perfume mixed with coconut sunscreen, hear the faint jingle of a silver charm bracelet on her wrist when she reaches for a hushpuppy off his plate without asking. She says she’s in town for the centennial, hired as the landscape architect to redo the veterans memorial downtown. She’s been back three days, was going to call him, was scared he’d slam the phone in her face.
Clay grunts, sipping his beer, the bitter hop taste sticking to his tongue. He tells her he would have slammed the phone. For 19 years, he thought she’d told Ellie he was a lost cause, that she should divorce him and move to Atlanta with her. Mara snorts, shaking her head, and her hand brushes his when she passes him a crumpled napkin for the tea stain on his arm. Her palm is warm, calloused at the fingertips, from digging in dirt, she says, when he notices. “I never told her to leave you,” she says, quiet enough he almost misses it over the Marines yelling. “I told her to stay. Told her you’d get your head on straight. I had the biggest stupid crush on you when I was a kid, for Christ’s sake. I thought you were worth fighting for.”
The words hang between them, thick as the humidity. Clay stares at her, the anger he’s carried for almost two decades feeling stupid, heavy, useless in his chest. He’d spent so long hating her he never thought to ask her side of the story. That’s his flaw, always has been: he’d rather be mad than wrong. He feels his face heat up, and he looks away, at the kids chasing fireflies across the field next to the VFW, at the sun sinking pink and orange over the treeline.
She doesn’t push him, just sits there, knee pressed to his, finishing off his coleslaw. The band switches to slow dance stuff, old 90s George Strait, and couples start drifting to the patch of grass they use as a dance floor. Mara nudges his arm with her elbow. “C’mon. Dance with me. I know you can dance, I saw you dance with Ellie at your wedding.” Clay hesitates. He hasn’t danced since Ellie’s 40th birthday, the year before she got sick. But Mara is already standing, tugging his wrist, her fingers curled around his, and he lets her pull him up.
Her hand rests on his shoulder, his hand on her waist, and he can feel the heat of her skin through the thin linen shirt. She pulls him closer, so their chests are almost touching, her hair brushing his jaw when she rests her head on his shoulder for a second. He can hear her breathing, soft against his neck, over the music. “I stayed away all these years because I thought you hated me,” she mumbles, so quiet only he can hear. “And because I knew if I was around you, I’d do something stupid, like kiss you, and Ellie would never forgive me.”
Clay’s throat goes dry. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about it, once or twice, in the years after Ellie died. The guilt had been too sharp, too heavy, to act on it. But now, with her in his arms, the guilt feels smaller, lighter, like it’s melting away in the July heat. He knows Ellie would laugh at him, call him an idiot for holding a grudge for 19 years, for being scared to be happy again.
The song ends, and she pulls back to look at him, her dark eyes glinting in the string lights strung up over the dance floor. She doesn’t say anything, just tugs his hand, leading him away from the VFW, down the dirt path to the lake at the edge of town. They walk slow, her hand in his, the gravel crunching under their boots, fireflies flickering around them. They stop at the old wooden dock Clay helped build back in 2002, when the town did a lakeside cleanup project.
Mara sits down on the edge, yanking her boots off, dipping her feet in the warm lake water, leaning back on her hands, looking up at him. He sits down next to her, their shoulders brushing, and he slips his work boots off too, dipping his feet in the water next to hers. She leans her head on his shoulder, and he can smell her sunscreen again, the lavender perfume, the faint sweetness of cherry lip balm when she tilts her head up to look at him.
When she leans in to kiss him, he doesn’t pull away.
