Rudy Galvan, 62, spent 38 years as a rural Ohio power lineman, still bears a snaking scar on his left bicep from a 2008 line fire. His wife Linda died of ovarian cancer in 2015, and since then he’s clung to a rigid, lonely routine: morning walks with his golden retriever Moe, odd generator repair jobs for neighbors, solo fishing trips on the lake, no detours. His quiet flaw is a terror of being seen as a sad, lecherous old man, so he’s turned down every blind date the local church ladies have pushed his way for seven years, even the ones with women his own age who hate tuna casserole and love bass fishing as much as he does.
He’s picking breadcrumbs off his jeans at the annual fire department fish fry, plastic plate piled with fried walleye and vinegar-soaked coleslaw, when he hears his name called. He looks up, and for a second he doesn’t recognize the woman approaching: sun-streaked brown hair pulled back in a red bandana, flour smudge on her forearm, flannel tied at her waist over a faded Fleetwood Mac tee, scuffed work boots caked in parking lot mud. Then she flashes that lopsided grin, identical to her dad’s, and he realizes it’s Clara Bennett, Jimmie Bennett’s kid, the girl he hasn’t seen since she left for art school in 2004. Jimmie was his line partner for 17 years, killed on the job in 2011 when a storm knocked a tree into their bucket truck, and Rudy still sends her a Christmas card every year, even though she never wrote back.
She yanks out the picnic bench across from him, sits hard enough that his beer sloshes in its plastic cup, and when she leans forward to grab napkins from the table center, her knee brushes his under the wood. He flinches like he’s been zapped, hot guilt twisting in his gut—he can still picture her at 16, acne-covered, begging him and Jimmie to let her ride in the bucket truck, screaming with laughter when they lifted her 30 feet up to gawk at the valley. She smells like cinnamon and fryer grease, and he spots the same tiny silver nostril stud she got at 15, the one Jimmie threw a fit over for three straight days.
She says she moved back to town last month, bought the shuttered Main Street bakery, has been hunting for him for weeks because a busted 1972 Generac in the basement needs fixing—she can’t afford to lose power mid-rise during storm season. He tells her he’s retired, no more side work, but she bats her eyelashes the same way she did at 10 when she wanted him to sneak her a candy bar before dinner, and he caves before he can overthink it, agrees to show up the next Saturday at 10 a.m. to take a look.
He’s 10 minutes early the next week, toolbox slung over his shoulder, Moe napping in the cab of his beat-up 2006 F-150. The bakery is closed, “Open” sign flipped to red, but she yells for him to come in the back before he can knock. The whole space smells like yeast and vanilla, trays of cinnamon rolls cooling on the counter, black coffee burbling on the back stove. She leads him down creaky wooden stairs to the basement, concrete cold through his work boots, dim string lights strung between exposed rafters. The generator is tucked under a stack of dented baking sheets, dust-caked, and he kneels to pop the carburetor cover, already running through common issues for that model in his head.
She kneels next to him 10 minutes later, holding a set of rusty socket wrenches she found in a closet, and her shoulder presses solid against his, warm through his flannel. He freezes, and she says she’s had a crush on him since she was 10, when he carried her out of her family’s flooded house during a 2001 storm, yelling at her to hold on tight so she didn’t slip. She says she never wrote back to his Christmas cards because she was embarrassed, scared she’d blurt out something stupid and give herself away.
He turns to look at her, their faces six inches apart, dim light catching gold flecks in her brown eyes, and she doesn’t look away when his gaze drops to her mouth. He’s spent the last week fighting thoughts of her, disgusted with himself for noticing how her jeans fit, replaying her laugh at his dumb lineman joke from the fish fry, convinced he’s a pervert preying on his dead partner’s daughter. But when she brushes her hand against his to pass him a greasy rag, he kisses her, slow and tentative at first, and she kisses him back, hand cupping his jaw, no hesitation, like she’s been waiting 32 years to do it.
He fixes the generator an hour later, tests it twice to make sure it fires on the first pull, and they climb back up to the bakery’s main floor. She cuts him a slice of still-warm peach pie, slides it across the counter with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. He asks her to the county fair the next weekend, admits he hasn’t gone since Linda died, hasn’t had anyone to ride the Ferris wheel with. She says yes, grinning that lopsided grin, says she’s gonna win him a giant stuffed bear at the ring toss, just like she tried to do when he brought her to the fair with Jimmie at 12. He laughs, takes a bite of pie, sweet juice bursting on his tongue, and Moe barks from outside the front door, tail thumping against the glass, impatient for them to finish. When she reaches across the counter to wipe a smudge of peach filling from his chin, he doesn’t flinch.
