Ray Voss, 58, retired lineman with a scar slicing across his left eyebrow from a 2017 line storm, propped his work boots on the lower rung of the community center bar stool and signaled the bartender for a second Pabst. He’d spent 11 hours that day hauling bleachers, stringing speaker wire, and patching potholes in the parade route, the first 4th of July parade his small Ohio town had run in four years. For three of those years, he’d left scathing comments on the school board’s Facebook page, calling the former ban on parades “cowardly bureaucratic garbage” and singling out the new board president, Clara Bennett, as the worst of the lot. He’d never met her, but he’d built up a whole persona for her: soft-handed, out of touch, a city transplant who didn’t care that the parade had been his late wife Ellie’s favorite day of the year.
The bar smelled like fried pickles and charcoal smoke drifting in from the parking lot grill, Johnny Cash’s *Folsom Prison Blues* warbling low over the hum of post-parade chatter. He was wiping mud off his knuckle when someone slid onto the stool two down from him, and he glanced up without thinking. Auburn hair streaked with silver pulled back in a messy braid, a smudge of neon pink face paint glittering on her left cheek, jeans splattered with grass stains from kneeling to help toddlers pick up candy off the route. She ordered bourbon neat, and when the bartender slid her glass across the bar at the same time he set down Ray’s beer, their hands brushed. Ray felt the rough, ridged callus on the side of her index finger first, the kind you get from years of gripping a trowel or a fence post, not typing at a desk.
She looked over, raised an eyebrow, and smirked. “Ray Voss, right? I saw you haul three bleacher sections by yourself this morning. I was gonna come over and help, but you looked like you’d bite my head off if I got within 10 feet.”
He froze. He’d pictured her in blazers, not a faded Lynyrd Skynyrd tee and scuffed work boots. He opened his mouth to snap something defensive, then shut it when she held out her hand. “Clara Bennett. I figure I owe you at least this beer, for all the comments you left me calling me a ‘parade-killing Karen.’”
He laughed before he could stop himself, rough and surprised. He shook her hand, and her grip was firm, no limp wrist nonsense. He’d told his poker group just last week he’d rather climb a 50 foot pole in a thunderstorm than say two words to her, and for a second he half expected one of them to pop out from behind the jukebox and tease him for folding so fast. He told her he’d meant every comment, at the time, and she nodded, said she didn’t blame him. Her dad had been a lineman too, she said, had worked the same county lines Ray had for 32 years, had ranted for months when the old board voted to cancel the parade. She’d run for board specifically to reverse the ban, she said, had spent six months fighting insurance companies and county officials to get the permit approved.
They talked for an hour, the stools between them abandoned when she shifted closer to hear him over a group of teens yelling about the fireworks show later. Their knees bumped under the bar every time one of them shifted, and he caught whiffs of her lavender perfume mixed with the smoke from the cigar the guy next to them was smoking. She leaned in when he talked about Ellie, how she’d made a red white and blue cake every year for the parade judges, how she’d died two weeks before the first canceled parade in 2020. She didn’t pat his arm or give him some sappy sorry for your loss line, just nodded, said her mom had died the same year, of the same lung cancer, that she’d also loved the parade.
He’d spent the last three years hating a woman he’d never met, had ranted about her to his buddies over poker every Friday night, had even refused to sign a petition she’d put up for new playground equipment at the elementary school. Now he was sitting next to her, noticing the tiny crinkles around her eyes when she laughed, the way she twisted the silver ring on her thumb when she talked about fighting the county, the way her shoulder brushed his when she leaned over to grab a fried pickle off the plate the bartender set between them. The sharp, righteous disgust he’d carried for so long melted fast, replaced by a warm, thrumming excitement he hadn’t felt since Ellie was alive, the kind of giddy thrill you get when you realize you’ve been dead wrong about something, and the correction is better than anything you could’ve imagined.
When the first boom of the pre-fireworks test went off outside, she slid off her stool and grabbed her jacket off the back of the chair. “C’mon,” she said, nodding toward the door. “I brought a blanket down by the lake. Best view in town. Unless you’d rather sit here and keep pretending you hate me.”
He grinned, grabbed his frayed flannel off the stool next to him, and followed her out into the warm July dark, the sound of kids laughing and Cash singing fading behind them as they walked down the gravel path toward the water, their shoulders brushing every few steps. He felt her hand brush his, then her fingers lace loosely through his, calluses catching on the raised edge of the scar on his knuckle.
