Elias Voss, 62, retired high-voltage lineman, perches on the far end of the VFW post’s scuffed linoleum bar at 7 p.m. on a rainy western Ohio Friday. His calloused palms wrap tight around a frosty Pabst draft, half gone, the condensation beading down his wrists to catch on the thick, silvery scar snaking up his left forearm—leftover from a 2017 line strike that almost cost him the arm, and his career, three years before he planned to retire. He’s avoided this end of the bar for months, but the regulars who usually camp here are at a high school football playoff game an hour away, and the fried catfish fry is the only meal within 20 miles that tastes even a little like the ones his late wife Linda used to make every Friday during Lent. His biggest flaw, one he’s barely admitted to himself, is that he’s spent the four years since Linda’s funeral pushing everyone away, convinced anyone who tries to strike up small talk is either after free wiring work for their farmhouse or angling to get a cut of his modest but reliable union pension. He’s mastered the art of the noncommittal grunt, the cold side-eye, the quiet shift further down the bar if someone gets too close.
The brass bell above the front door jingles over the low rumble of Johnny Cash on the jukebox, and he glances up without thinking. It’s Maeve Croft, 58, the new county ag extension agent that every old guy at the post has been gossiping about for three weeks straight. She moved back to her childhood hometown after ditching her husband of 30 years in Columbus, wears bright red lipstick even on rainy days, laughed in the post commander’s face when he told her they couldn’t host a women’s hunter safety course here because “the guys don’t want their space cluttered up.” He’d avoided her every time she’d stopped by the post, written her off as pushy, entitled, the kind of person who would demand more than he was willing to give. The only empty stool in the whole bar is two seats down from him. She slides into it, and he tenses, already rehearsing the grunt he’ll use to shut down any conversation.
She orders a bourbon on the rocks, nods at him when the bartender slides it over, and he grunts as planned, turning his face back to his beer. He catches a whiff of her perfume then—jasmine, exactly the kind Linda wore every Sunday to church—and his chest tightens. She leans across the gap between them to grab a paper napkin from the holder mounted to the bar, her soft wool sweater brushing the bare skin of his bicep, and he flinches so hard a little beer sloshes over the rim of his glass. She apologizes immediately, her voice lower and softer than he expected, no loud brashness to the tone the old guys had complained about. He mumbles that it’s fine, dabs at the spill with the napkin she hands him. She nods at the faded lineman’s logo stitched to the back of his jacket hanging on the stool next to him, says her dad did the same work for 27 years, died in the 2001 ice storm when a pole snapped on him mid-repair.
He blinks, thrown. He’d expected a comment about the hunter safety course, or a request for free work, not that. They talk slow, at first, him giving one word answers, her teasing him gently about the way he’s clutching his beer like he’s scared a 19-year-old private is gonna sneak by and steal it. He finds himself laughing, a quiet rusty sound he hasn’t heard come out of his own mouth in at least two years. The voice in the back of his head keeps screaming that he’s making a mistake, that the guys at the other end of the bar are staring, that he’s betraying Linda by even talking to another woman, but the noise gets quieter the longer she talks about growing up helping her dad fix fence posts on their family farm, about how she left her ex after she found out he’d been cheating on her with his secretary for six years.
When she asks if he wants to split an order of catfish nuggets, he hesitates for half a second before saying yes. She passes him the tartar sauce when the plate hits the bar, and their fingers brush, warm and calloused from her own work repairing fence and hauling soil samples, and he doesn’t pull away. He looks up into her hazel eyes, crinkled at the corners when she smiles, and realizes the disgust he’d been primed to feel is nothing more than fear, fear of letting someone in again, fear of getting hurt. He admits he hasn’t spoken to anyone for more than five minutes outside of the hardware store cashier in months, and she nods like she gets it, says she spent two years barely leaving her house in Columbus before she packed up her truck and moved back home.
The rain picks up as the bar empties out, most of the remaining regulars heading home to watch the late game. She mentions she’s got a leaky gutter on the back of her new rental house that she can’t reach, even with her step ladder, and he offers to fix it tomorrow for free, no strings attached. She laughs, says she’ll pay him in a slice of the peach pie she baked that morning, sitting on her kitchen counter still warm. He walks her to her beat-up Ford F-150 when she leaves, holds the door open for her, and she touches the scar on his forearm softly with her fingertips before she climbs in, says she’ll see him at 10 a.m.
He drives home in the rain, the wipers slapping slow against the windshield. He pulls into his driveway, turns on the porch light, and realizes for the first time in four years, he’s looking forward to the next day. He drags his old ladder out of the garage to make sure it’s still stable, grabs his tape measure and a box of gutter screws from his workbench. He sets the tape measure on the kitchen counter next to his car keys, already counting the hours until morning.
