He tensed so hard his beer sloshed over the side when he saw her. Mara Hale, 52, the county health inspector who’d shown up at his property three months prior, clipboard tucked under her arm, and told him his hand-built smokehouse was 12 feet too close to the property line, had to be torn down within 30 days. He’d called her a power-tripping bureaucrat under his breath, slammed his gate in her face, and spent three nights bitching about her to the guy at the hardware store while he bought lumber for a new shed. Now she was walking straight for him, barefoot in cutoff jean shorts and a linen button-down tied at the waist, a neon pink scrunchie holding half her auburn hair off her freckled face. She set a can of peach seltzer down on the table next to his beer, her elbow brushing his bicep for a beat longer than necessary, and the smell of coconut sunscreen and dill pickles cut straight through the cloud of charcoal and burnt hot dog fumes hanging over the party.
She leaned in, raising her voice over the band, and said she’d been meaning to track him down. The old property surveys for his land had been wrong, she said—his smokehouse was well within his boundary line, she’d signed off on the corrected paperwork that morning. She grinned when he blinked, stunned, and admitted she’d heard him mutter “Karen” under his breath when she left his place, didn’t blame him, she’d hated having to deliver the notice even when she thought it was right. He felt his ears go pink, the kind of embarrassed flush he hadn’t had since he was a teen getting chewed out by his fire chief for forgetting his gear. She reached across him to grab a stack of napkins from the other side of the table, her chest brushing his shoulder for half a second, and both of them froze before she pulled back, licking a smudge of barbecue sauce off her lower lip, not looking away from his face.
He’d spent three months actively avoiding her, rolling his eyes whenever her name came up in conversation at the hardware store, but now he couldn’t stop staring at the chipped navy polish on her nails, the small scar on her jaw from a horseback riding accident she mentioned offhand, the way she laughed when he admitted he’d spent two whole days tearing the smokehouse down, cussing her name the entire time. She told him her husband, a park ranger, had died six years prior, they’d built three smokehouses together over the course of their marriage, she knew all the tricks for curing pork that didn’t get you in trouble with the health department. She offered to help him rebuild, if he promised to save her the first rack of ribs. The logical part of his brain screamed to turn her down, to keep his routine quiet and uncomplicated, to not let anyone get close enough to see the parts of him that were still charred around the edges, but he nodded before he could talk himself out of it. She scribbled her number on a crumpled napkin, her fingers brushing his when she handed it over, her palm warm and calloused from the vegetable garden she tended on weekends.
By 9 p.m., the kids were passed out on blankets spread across the grass, the band had switched to slow, twangy covers of 90s country songs, and most of the neighbors had headed home. Mara asked if he wanted to walk down to the creek at the end of the block, and he agreed without hesitation. The grass was dewy and cool under their bare feet when they kicked off their shoes at the bank, the water cold enough to make him hiss when he dipped his toes in. She sat down next to him on a flat, smooth rock, their shoulders pressed tight together, no space between them, and fireflies flickered over the surface of the water while crickets chirped in the trees lining the bank. She told him she’d seen him at the hardware store every Saturday for six months, always carrying lumber or nails, always looking like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He told her about the fire that killed his crew, about his wife leaving him a year later when he couldn’t stop waking up screaming in the middle of the night, that he’d moved here to not have to talk about any of it ever again. She didn’t say anything, just laced her fingers through his, her hand fitting perfectly in his, rough and scarred and warm, and he didn’t pull away.
They sat there for an hour, not talking much, just listening to the creek gurgle over the rocks. When they walked back to her beat-up Subaru at the end of the block, she leaned up, kissed him on the cheek first, soft, then on the mouth, slow, tasting like peach seltzer and mint gum. He kissed her back, one hand light on her waist, not too hard, not too soft, the scar on his eyebrow pulling a little when he smiled into the kiss. She told him she’d be at his cabin at 10 a.m. Saturday, she was bringing her own meat thermometer, and if he lied about the internal temp of the pork she’d write him a fake citation just to mess with him. He laughed, the first real, unforced laugh he’d had since he left Oregon. She got in her car, rolled down the window, and waved as she pulled away, and he stood there in the dark holding the crumpled napkin with her number scrawled on it, already looking forward to the argument they’d definitely have over how much salt to rub into the ribs.
