Jake Marlow, 62, stood at the edge of the Maplewood Fire Department chili cookoff, paper bowl of three-alarm chili sweating through his frayed work gloves, sawdust still crammed under the nails of his left hand. He’d only shown up because his 22-year-old niece, the department’s newest recruit, had threatened to dump a full case of fire extinguisher foam all over his vintage camper restoration workshop if he bailed again. He hated these things, hated the forced small talk, hated the way every neighbor he ran into always asked if he was “seeing anyone yet” like being alone was some kind of contagious disease he needed to be cured of. He was just about to toss his half-eaten chili in the trash and bolt for his beat-up Ford F150 when he heard her voice.
“Jake Marlow. I’d know that oil-stained Carhartt jacket anywhere.” He turned, and there was Lena Voss, 58, ex-wife of his old business partner Ray, the woman he’d spent 15 years avoiding like a speeding ticket. She looked almost exactly the same as he remembered: wavy auburn hair streaked with gray pulled back in a red bandana, freckles across her nose, that same half-smirk that used to make him fumble his tape measure at company holiday parties back when his wife Carol was still alive. She was holding a dented plastic cup of sweet tea, and when she stepped closer to avoid a kid darting past with a face full of blue cotton candy, her elbow brushed his bicep. The fabric of her flannel shirt was soft, worn thin at the cuffs, and he caught a whiff of jasmine lotion and smoked sausage drifting up from the grill by the fire truck.
His first instinct was to mumble a half-assed greeting and leave. Ray had screwed him out of $40k on a custom cabinet job back in 2011, and Lena had been married to him then, even if she’d filed for divorce six months later. More than that, he’d made a hard rule for himself after Carol died of breast cancer eight years prior: no messy lines, no drama, no women who came with any kind of baggage tied to his old life. He’d closed their joint woodworking business a year after she passed, switched to restoring vintage campers alone out of his pole barn, turned down every date his sister tried to set him up on, avoided every event that might force him to interact with people he’d known before 2015. He valued his quiet, predictable routine more than he valued anything else, and Lena was the exact kind of disruption he’d spent years running from.
But she sat down on the picnic table bench next to him, knee brushing his denim-clad thigh, and didn’t give him a chance to run. She told him she’d seen his posts in the local vintage camper Facebook group, the before and after shots of the 1968 Winnebago he’d finished last month for a retired teacher from Des Moines. She’d bought a 1972 Airstream Sovereign the year before, sitting half-rotted in a field outside of town, and she’d been trying to find someone to restore it for her for months. Every contractor she’d talked to either wanted twice what she could pay, or tried to hit on her before they even looked at the rotting floor plans. She knew he did good work, knew he didn’t overcharge, knew he didn’t waste time on small talk he didn’t want to have.
He shifted an inch away from her on the bench, then felt stupid for it. He’d always liked Lena, even when Ray was being a drunken asshole to her at parties, even when he’d told himself he couldn’t be friends with her out of loyalty to both Ray and Carol. Carol had once told him, drunk on spiked eggnog at their 2010 Christmas party, that Lena deserved way better than Ray, and that if they ever got divorced, he should stop being such a stick in the mud and ask her out. He’d laughed it off then, called Carol crazy, but he’d thought about that conversation more than once in the years since Carol died, since Ray moved to Texas and never came back, since he’d started waking up at 5am every morning just to sit on his porch and drink coffee alone. The idea of crossing that line made his skin crawl with guilt, but the idea of sending her away made his chest feel tight, like he was missing something he didn’t even know he wanted.
She leaned in then, so close he could see the tiny flecks of gold in her hazel eyes, and reached up to brush a fleck of sawdust off his cheek. Her fingers were calloused, he noticed, from the pottery studio she ran out of her garage, something he’d heard she started shortly after her divorce. “I know you still carry a torch for Carol,” she said, soft enough no one else could hear over the band playing old Johnny Cash covers by the pavilion. “I’m not asking you to forget her. I’m asking if you want to stop hiding from things that might make you happy for a change.”
He stared at her for a long second, the taste of spicy chili still burning on his tongue, the sound of the crowd fading out for a beat, and realized he was tired. Tired of eating frozen meatloaf dinners alone in his workshop, tired of going to bed at 8pm just to pass the time, tired of acting like the only person he was allowed to care about was someone who was gone. He nodded, told her he’d come look at the Airstream Saturday morning, 10am, as long as she had a pot of strong black coffee waiting. She grinned, pulled a crumpled piece of receipt paper out of her jeans pocket with her address scrawled on it, and pressed it into his palm, her fingers lingering for two beats longer than they needed to.
She stood up, waved, and walked off to join a group of her friends by the grill, and he sat there for another 10 minutes, holding the paper, the ghost of her touch still on his cheek and his palm. He didn’t bolt early, for once. He stayed, ate a second bowl of chili, even talked to a couple of guys he knew from the hardware store about a new cordless power sander he’d been eyeing for weeks. When he got in his truck to drive home, he tucked the piece of paper with Lena’s address into the sun visor, right next to the old polaroid of Carol he kept there, and turned the key in the ignition.
