Ronan O’Malley, 62, retired Chicago air traffic controller, has lived alone in his weathered Maple Lake cottage for eight years, ever since his wife packed her bags and moved to Arizona with a retired golf pro. He’s turned down every blind date the local church ladies have tried to set up for him, convinced romance after 50 is nothing but shared prescription discount cards and arguments over who has to unclog the kitchen sink. He only left the house that sweltering July Saturday because the annual Maple Lake Rib Cook-off serves the only ribs in town that don’t taste like they were reheated in a microwave.
The line for the top-rated rib stand is 20 people deep, Ronan sweating through the back of his faded White Sox tee while he nurses a cold Miller Lite, when someone bumps hard into his left side. He turns, ready to snap at the careless pedestrian, and comes face to face with Clara Bennett, his next door neighbor Marnie’s niece. He’s only seen her in passing for the last decade, remembers her as the loud, lanky teen who used to spend summers here chasing Marnie’s golden retriever through the neighborhood. Now she’s 48, sun streaks running through her auburn hair, a smattering of freckles across her nose, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a faded Fleetwood Mac tee that fits her shoulders just right. She apologizes, grinning, and her sun-warmed arm stays pressed to his bicep while she complains about the crowd being wilder than last year. He smells coconut sunscreen and hickory smoke curling off the grill pits behind them, holds eye contact a beat too long, and has to glance away at a kid chasing a dog with a dripping popsicle to get his bearings.
He offers to carry her paper plate once they get their orders, slathered in sticky sweet barbecue sauce, and she accepts, following him to a shaded picnic table near the shore. Marnie went home early to ice her post-knee-surgery swelling, so it’s just the two of them. When he leans forward to grab a handful of napkins, his knee knocks against hers under the table, and he feels a jolt up his spine like he’s 17 again sitting next to his first date at the drive-in. He makes a crack about the cook-off judge, old Tom Henderson, who has awarded first place to his own younger brother’s rib stand seven years running, no matter how dry or burnt the meat is. She snorts so hard lemon lime soda comes out of her nose, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and says she remembers that—she and her cousin used to call Tom the “rib fixer” when they were teens.
He spends the next 45 minutes fighting the urge to stare at her mouth when she talks, kicking himself for acting like a horny freshman. She’s 14 years younger than him, only in town for two more weeks to help Marnie recover, and she probably sees him as the grumpy old guy down the street who yells when kids cut through his yard to get to the lake. He’s half ready to make an excuse about needing to feed his cat and leave when she mentions his old 1987 Mastercraft speedboat, the one he sold three years ago when his knees got too bad to pull skiers. She says she still thinks about the day he let her drive it when she was 19, even when she cut it too close to the sandbar and he yelled so loud all the geese flew off the shore. “I thought you were the coolest person I’d ever met back then,” she says, picking at a piece of rib meat on her plate, not looking at him, “I had the biggest dumb crush on you for, like, three straight summers.”
They walk down the shore after they finish eating, gravel crunching under their scuffed sneakers, the sky shifting from tangerine to soft lavender as the sun dips below the tree line on the other side of the lake. They sit on a weathered oak log half buried in the sand, don’t talk much, just watch a great blue heron glide low over the water, fireflies starting to blink in the tall grass at the edge of the shore. He tells her he makes peach pie every August, uses peaches from the gnarled old tree in his backyard, the recipe was his grandma’s, no one else has tasted it since his wife left. She says she has a bottle of 10-year bourbon she brought from Denver, no one to drink it with, she’ll bring it over tomorrow night at 7.
He walks her to Marnie’s porch, the screen door creaking loud when she pulls it open. She turns to him, leans up, and presses a soft, quick kiss to his cheek, her lips tasting like peach sweet tea and mint. He stands on the sidewalk until the light inside her second floor guest room flicks on, then walks back to his cottage, the ghost of her kiss still warm on his skin, smiling so wide his cheeks hurt.
