Mace Hollis, 61, spent 34 years fabricating highway signs for the Wisconsin DOT before retiring three years prior, and the quirk he’d never been able to shake was noticing every typo, every misaligned bolt on public signage within 10 feet of him. It drove his late wife, Karen, crazy for the entirety of their 31 year marriage, right up until she died of lung cancer in 2015. Since then, he’d lived alone in a one bedroom A-frame 12 miles outside Eau Claire, making custom metal yard art to sell at regional fairs and farmers markets, turning down every fixed-up date his sister and old work buddies tried to set him up on, convinced any new romantic entanglement was a betrayal of the life he’d built with Karen.
The August county fair day was sticky, 91 degrees with a humidity thick enough to sip, the air sharp with fried cheese curd grease, cotton candy sugar, and the low rumble of tractor pulls coming from the grandstand at the far end of the grounds. Mace was wiping a smudge of clear coat off a metal oak leaf sun catcher when a shadow fell across his booth, and he looked up to see Lena Marlow, Karen’s first cousin, leaning against the edge of his folding table, holding a paper plate piled high with peach pie.
He’d not spoken to Lena more than 10 minutes total in the eight years since Karen’s funeral. He’d avoided her, on purpose, because he’d carried a dumb, quiet crush on her since he was 22, back when she’d shown up to his and Karen’s backyard housewarming party on a dirt bike, covered in mud, carrying a 12 pack of Pabst, and had beat him at cornhole three times in a row. She was 58, divorced for 13 years, lived up in Duluth where she ran a small orchard, and only came down to this fair once a year to sell her pies and jams out of the booth two spots down from his.
Her cutoff denim shorts showed the thin, silvery scar on her left thigh from that 1992 camping trip they’d all taken, when she’d crashed her dirt bike trying to jump a fallen log, and Mace had carried her half a mile back to the campground to get her to urgent care. He still remembered the way she’d laughed the whole walk, even when the bone was poking through her skin, calling him a wimp for grimacing every time she shifted her weight.
“Figured you haven’t eaten anything all day but the terrible pretzels from the concession stand,” she said, holding the plate out. Their fingers brushed when he took it, the callus on the pad of her thumb catching on the scar across his knuckle from a sheet metal accident back in 2007, and he felt a jolt go up his arm so sharp he almost dropped the pie. The crust was still warm, the peach juice oozing out the sides and dripping down his wrist before he could take a bite, and she laughed, stepping closer to wipe it off with the edge of her gingham apron, her palm brushing his skin for half a second longer than necessary.
He didn’t step back. He stood there, eating the pie, while she told him about her orchard, about the late frost that had killed 40% of her peach crop that spring, about the new golden retriever puppy she’d adopted that kept stealing peaches off the lower branches. The crowd thinned as the sun went down, the Ferris wheel at the midline of the fairgrounds blinking on, pink and purple and gold, the sound of a country cover band drifting over from the beer garden. They stood close enough that he could smell coconut sunscreen on her skin, and the faint sticky sweet scent of peach syrup on her wrists, and when she leaned past him to point at a 4 foot tall metal sunflower he’d welded, her shoulder pressed to his bicep, and she didn’t move away for a full 17 seconds, he counted.
The whole time, he was fighting that quiet, familiar war in his head: disgust at himself for even thinking about her like that, like he was cheating on Karen, and the sharp, warm pull of desire, the sense that for the first time in eight years, he was talking to someone who didn’t treat him like he was made of glass, like he’d break if anyone mentioned his wife’s name. She didn’t tiptoe around Karen, either, she brought up the time Karen had dyed her hair neon pink for a 90s themed costume party, the time the three of them had driven to Milwaukee to see a Packers game and had gotten stuck in a snowstorm on the way back, sleeping in the car for 6 hours because the highway was closed.
“Karen used to tell me, all the time, that if anything ever happened to her, I was supposed to look after your grumpy ass,” she said, after he finally admitted why he’d been avoiding her for eight years, why he’d left every family function early if she was there, why he’d never replied to any of the texts she’d sent checking in on him after the funeral. She laughed, shaking her head, her brown eyes crinkling at the corners. “Said I was the only person who could put up with your obsession with highway signs and refusal to eat any vegetable that wasn’t deep fried. Told me if I didn’t make a move on you after a year or two, she’d come back and haunt both of us.”
That was the thing that broke him, the tension draining out of his shoulders so fast he almost had to lean against the table to stay upright. He didn’t feel guilty anymore, didn’t feel like he was doing something wrong. He felt light, like a weight he’d been carrying for eight years had just lifted off his chest.
They closed up their booths an hour early, him loading the leftover metal art into the bed of his old Ford F150, her loading the leftover pies and jam jars into her pickup. He followed her back to his A-frame, and she carried a whole peach pie and a six pack of Pabst up the porch steps, just like she had to that housewarming party 39 years prior. They sat on his porch swing, drinking beer, eating pie straight out of the tin, watching fireflies blink on and off in the oak trees at the edge of his property, the crickets chirping so loud they almost drowned out the distant sound of the fair’s fireworks going off.
She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he wrapped his arm around her waist, the fabric of her tank top soft under his palm, her hair smelling like coconut and peach. When he passed her the last slice of pie, their fingers brushed again, and this time, he laced his fingers through hers, holding on tight.
