Manny Ruiz, 62, spent 31 years teaching high school woodshop before retiring three years ago, and he still can’t shake the habit of tucking a half-used pencil behind his left ear even when he’s only manning his farmers market booth. His biggest flaw, the one his late wife Linda used to tease him about relentlessly, is that he’s stubborn to a fault—he’d rather sleep on a lumpy couch for six months than admit he bought the wrong size mattress, and for eight years after Linda’s breast cancer death, he’d rather eat frozen meatloaf alone every Saturday night than even consider dating, convinced any interest in another woman was a betrayal of their 34 year marriage.
Mid-September in west Michigan smells like pressed apple cider, damp oak leaves, and the burnt sugar of the cider donut stand two booths down from his. He’s wiping fine cherry sawdust off the arm of a custom Adirondack chair when Clara Bennett steps up to the edge of his table, and his throat goes tight before he can stop it. Clara is Linda’s oldest friend, they’d been roommates in college, and Manny has carried a quiet, guilt-ridden crush on her for at least five years, a secret he’d buried so deep he never even admitted it to himself until last summer, when he saw her laughing at a family cookout, beer in one hand, chasing his 7 year old grandson around the yard with a water gun.
She leans across the table to run a fingertip along the curved edge of the chair’s armrest, and her linen sleeve brushes his bare wrist. The contact is light, accidental, but it sends a jolt up his arm that he hasn’t felt since he was 19 and Linda first kissed him in the back of his beat-up Camaro. He can smell lavender lotion on her skin, the same scent she wore to Linda’s funeral, and her gold hoop earrings catch the afternoon sun when she tilts her head to look at him, eye contact steady, no awkward looking away like most people do when they talk to the widower who still wears his wedding band on a chain around his neck.
She says she needs two chairs for her new back porch, she finalized her divorce from Greg last month, finally got the lake house they’d been fighting over for two years. He nods, makes a dumb joke about charging a 10% premium for chairs sturdy enough to hold a full plate of grilled brats and a 16 ounce craft beer, and she laughs so hard she snorts, the same snort she used to make when Linda would tell embarrassing stories about their college days. The guilt nags at the back of his head the whole time they talk, a quiet voice saying you shouldn’t be enjoying this, Linda would be furious, but he can’t look away from the crinkles at the corner of her eyes, the way she tucks a strand of salt-and-pepper hair behind her ear when she’s listening, the fact that she remembers his grandson made the travel soccer team this year, a detail he only mentioned once at a holiday dinner three years ago.
When he tells her he’ll need two weeks to build the chairs, she hesitates for a second, then asks if he wants to grab a cider donut and walk the lake path once he closes up his booth for the day. His first instinct is to say no, to make up an excuse about needing to get home to sand a table he’s working on, but then he looks at her, and he can see the nervousness in her smile, like she’s been working up the courage to ask for a long time. He says yes before he can overthink it.
The gravel path crunches under their work boots, and the lake wind is cool enough that it raises goosebumps on his arms. A strand of her hair blows across his forearm when they walk side by side, close enough that their shoulders brush every few steps, and he has to fight the urge to tuck it behind her ear. They stop at a small overlook, the water dark blue and choppy below them, and she says she’s wanted to ask him out for three years, but she didn’t want to overstep when he was still grieving, thought he’d never see her as anything more than Linda’s friend.
He admits he’s thought about her too, that he’s felt guilty for it for years, convinced Linda would hate him for even looking at her best friend that way. She laughs, soft, and says Linda pulled her aside two years before she died, made her promise that if Manny ever started moping too much after she was gone, Clara had permission to knock some sense into him and take him out for a good steak dinner. The tight knot of guilt in his chest loosens all at once, like someone cut the string holding it together.
He lifts his hand, slow, like he’s approaching a skittish deer, and brushes that stray strand of hair off her face, his knuckle brushing her cheek. She leans into the touch, no hesitation, and she reaches up to wrap her hand around his wrist for half a second before she pulls away. They agree to meet at the steakhouse downtown next Friday, 7 PM, she says she’ll even spring for the loaded baked potato.
He walks her back to her SUV, and she squeezes his hand tight before she climbs in, waving when she pulls out of the parking lot. He heads back to his booth to load the remaining chairs into his truck, and he spots a small tube of lavender lip balm sitting on the edge of his table, left behind when she leaned over to look at the chair wood samples. He tucks it into the pocket of his flannel shirt before he locks up his truck.
