Fifty-four year old Ronan O’Malley, vintage camper restoration specialist, had avoided the McDowell County Fire Department’s annual pig roast for seven straight years. The small mountain town of Black Mountain ran on gossip, and every single year without fail, some well-meaning neighbor would try to set him up with their widowed sister, their divorced dental hygienist, their cousin who loved hiking just like he did. He’d bailed every time, until his best friend and part-time fireman Jeb showed up at his barn shop two days prior, holding a six pack of his favorite IPA and reminding Ronan he’d fixed Jeb’s 1968 Airstream for free after a tree fell on it. The favor was owed, so Ronan showed up, boots caked in pine resin, flannel rolled to the elbows, scar across his left forearm from a table saw accident last winter still pink at the edges.
He leaned against a gnarled white pine 20 feet from the picnic tables, sipping sweet tea and tuning out the roar of conversation, when he spotted her. Everyone in town knew Clara Voss, the new county public health officer who’d shut down the fire department’s weekly snack stand three weeks prior for cross-contaminating raw hot dog buns with burger juice. The crowd had been side-eyeing her since she walked in 20 minutes earlier, jeans scuffed, blazer discarded in her car, hair pulled back in a messy braid. The only empty spot near the cooler was right next to his tree, so she headed that way, and Ronan tensed, half-ready to make an excuse to leave before anyone assumed he was talking to the woman everyone loved to hate.
She reached for a black cherry seltzer at the exact same time he reached for a second iced tea. Their knuckles brushed, and he was surprised by how cold her skin was, even through the condensation on the plastic bottle. She smelled like cedar hand soap and peppermint lip balm, nothing like the cloying jasmine perfume his ex-wife had worn for 12 years. “Sorry,” she said, pulling her hand back, a half-smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Figured I’d grab a drink before someone slips a laxative in my soda for shutting down their hot dog stand.”
Ronan huffed a laugh before he could stop himself. He’d spent so long only talking to clients and Jeb and the old guy who ran the lumber yard that he’d forgotten what it felt like to banter with someone who didn’t already know every single detail of his divorce. “They’re still mad about that. Half the guys here have been complaining you ruined their post-fire call snack runs.” She leaned against the tree a foot away from him, close enough that he could feel the faint heat off her shoulder when the wind shifted. “I offered to help them redo the setup for free. They told me I could stick my clipboard where the sun don’t shine. Their loss, their stand still has a rat problem they’re ignoring.”
He kept waiting for the urge to cut the conversation short, to mumble an excuse about needing to get back to his shop and work on the 1971 Winnebago he was restoring for a client out of Charlotte. It never came. She told him she’d moved to the area from Chicago three months prior, was living in a half-renovated 1972 VW Bus while she saved for a down payment on a cottage, couldn’t for the life of her figure out why the water pump kept shorting out. He told her he had three identical water pumps in his shop’s back storage, would give her one for 20 bucks if she brought the bus by. The whole time, he was hyper aware of the eyes on them, the quiet mutters from the picnic tables, the way a group of firemen had stopped talking to stare.
The conflict hit when one of the younger guys, a part-timer Ronan had fixed a pop-up camper for last spring, yelled across the field, loud enough for half the crowd to hear: “Hey Doc, here to shut us down mid-pork bite? We used clean tongs, I swear.”
Ronan didn’t even think about it. He shifted his weight, stepping six inches closer to Clara, so his bicep brushed her shoulder, and raised his voice just enough for the guy and the group around him to hear. “Nah, she’s with me. And if you got a problem with her being here, you can go back to fixing your own broken camper lift next time it falls off the hitch.”
The guy shut up, and the group turned back to their food. Clara looked up at him, the golden hour sun gilding the edges of her braid, her brown eyes bright, no hint of the professional stiffness he’d seen in photos of her at county board meetings. Their faces were less than a foot apart, and for a second he thought she was going to kiss him, right there in front of half the town. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said, her voice lower than before, almost soft.
He shrugged, like it was no big deal, even though his heart was hammering so hard he was half-convinced she could hear it. “They’re being assholes. And I need someone to test the new peach pie recipe I messed around with last weekend. No one I know likes peaches enough to be honest about it.”
She stayed next to him for the rest of the roast, their shoulders brushing every time one of them shifted, neither of them moving away. When the sun dipped below the mountains and the crowd started packing up coolers and folding chairs, he asked her if she wanted to follow him back to his shop to grab the water pump, maybe stay for that slice of pie. She nodded, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and when they walked to his beat-up Ford F-150 parked at the edge of the field, she reached up and brushed a stray pine needle off the shoulder of his flannel, her fingers lingering against the fabric for half a second longer than necessary. He opened the passenger door for her, and she slid into the seat, the faint scent of peppermint following her.
