Russell Voss, 62, retired upstate New York high school woodshop teacher, leaned against a splintered beer tent pole and stared at the dregs of his sour ale. He’d only shown up to the town’s annual summer beer garden because his niece ran the bratwurst stall and had threatened to hide all his specialty sanding blocks if he bailed. For 15 years, he’d avoided large community events like this, ever since his wife left him for Jake Hale, a 26-year-old former student of his who’d gone on to teach math at the same school. His flaw was obvious to anyone who knew him: he’d built a wall so thick around his routine—wake at 6, sand vintage Adirondack chairs for 4 hours, eat a turkey sandwich at noon, watch old westerns after dinner—that he’d forgotten how to talk to anyone who didn’t ask about oak grain or weather sealant.
The air smelled like charred onion, pine from the nearby state park, and yeast spilling from overfilled beer cups. A cover band strummed the opening to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” off to his left, and fireflies darted between the string lights strung over the picnic tables. He was just about to toss his cup and head for the parking lot when a woman stepped in front of him, holding a frothy radler, silver streaks cutting through her dark wavy hair, a faded Pearl Jam flannel tied around her waist, scuffed work boots caked with topsoil.
“Russell? I’m Elara. I bought that curly maple Adirondack chair from you at the farmers market last month,” she said, leaning in a little to be heard over the music, her shoulder brushing his bicep for half a second. The scent of lavender soap and citrus hit him, sharp and warm, and he froze when he placed the last name: Elara Hale. Jake’s ex-wife.
He took a half step back automatically, his jaw tightening. He’d spent 15 years hating Jake, and by extension, anyone tied to him, even if he’d never met Elara before. He knew they’d divorced three years prior, the whole town had talked about it—Jake had cheated on her with a 22-year-old grad student he’d met at a teaching conference. Still, every instinct screamed that talking to her was a line he shouldn’t cross, that he was inviting the kind of chaos he’d spent a decade and a half running from.
But she didn’t miss the shift in his posture, and she laughed, low and dry, holding her hands up. “I know. I get it. If I were you, I’d walk away right now. But I owe you an apology, for one thing. Jake spent years ranting about how you were the only teacher in that school who ever called him out for cutting corners, and turns out he was exactly the kind of guy who cuts corners on everything.”
He blinked, surprised, and didn’t step back when she leaned in again, pointing to the calluses on his left hand. “That chair you built? It’s the nicest thing I own. I sit out on my back porch in it every morning, drink coffee, watch the bluebirds nest in the oak tree by my fence. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for months, but I was scared you’d tell me to go to hell before I got two words out.”
He found himself smiling before he could stop himself. They sat down at an empty picnic table, their knees brushing every time one of them shifted, and she told him about her job as a landscape designer, about the client who’d demanded she plant 50 rose bushes in a shaded yard that got zero direct sunlight, about her 24-year-old son who was studying forestry in Vermont. He told her about the 1950s rocking chair he was restoring for a couple in town, about how his niece kept trying to set him up with her friend who ran the local bookstore, how he’d turned her down three times already.
When the band switched to a slower country song, she leaned in so close her hair brushed his cheek, and he could feel the heat of her breath on his ear when she said she’d been looking for someone to build a set of raised herb beds for her backyard, that she’d pay him twice his usual rate if he’d come look at the space sometime. He felt that pull in his chest, the war between the part of him that wanted to say no, go home, stick to his routine, and the part that hadn’t felt this light, this seen, in 15 years. He’d spent so long convincing himself that anything tied to Jake was tainted, that he’d missed out on the fact that Elara was nothing like him, sharp and funny and unapologetic, the kind of woman who didn’t mince words, who had dirt under her nails and a sticker of a chainsaw on her water bottle.
When she stood up, she held her hand out to him, her palm calloused from hauling mulch and planting shrubs, and asked him if he wanted to come back to her place right then, to see the chair, to check out the spot for the herb beds. He hesitated for two seconds, then took her hand, his calluses rough against hers, and stood up.
They walked out of the beer garden together, the sound of the band fading behind them, fireflies darting over the sidewalk, the cool July air biting at his bare arms. She didn’t let go of his hand when they crossed the street, her fingers laced through his, and he didn’t pull away. The faint glow of her porch light came into view two blocks over, and he realized he hadn’t thought about his ex or Jake once in the last hour and a half.
