Milo Rourke, 62, retired lineman for Jackson County’s rural electric co-op, hunches over a plastic picnic table at the annual fire department chili cookoff, picking at a bowl of extra-spicy three-alarm he scored from the west side station. His hands are crisscrossed with thin white scars from climbing poles in ice storms, his left knuckle permanently swollen from a 2017 slip into a transformer. He’s avoided public events like this for most of the eight years since his wife Ellie died, guilt heavy enough to make small talk feel like a chore: he’d been 36 hours into a storm repair shift when her stroke hit, his work phone dead, and he came home to find her on the kitchen floor next to a half-mixed bowl of blackberry pie filling. He still hasn’t touched a blackberry pie since.
The air smells like cumin, wood smoke, and spiced apple cider from the 4-H booth a few rows over, a bluegrass band plucking a slow, twangy version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” from the stage near the fairground entrance. He’s halfway through a sip of lukewarm Bud Light when a tray clatters down next to him, and a woman’s laugh pulls his eyes up.
He recognizes her immediately. Lena Marlow, Ellie’s second cousin, 58, who he hadn’t seen since Ellie’s funeral, when she hugged him tight and slipped a jar of her homemade pickles into his truck before driving back to Louisville. She’s got a thick streak of silver cutting through her dark, wavy hair, a faded flannel tied around her waist, work boots caked with potting soil, and the same scar snaking up her left wrist from a 16-year-old bike crash he’d patched up with electrical tape and Neosporin from his work truck before driving her to the ER. She moved back to town three weeks prior, he’d heard from the grocery store cashier, taking over her mom’s flower shop after her mom passed last spring.
“Thought that was you,” she says, sliding onto the bench across from him, her knee brushing his under the table. He tenses, half-ready to mumble an excuse and leave, but she leans forward, elbows on the sticky tabletop, and grins. “Still wearing that beat-up Carhartt you had when you fixed my fence back in ‘09? I swear that thing is indestructible.”
He laughs, a rough, rusty sound he hasn’t pulled out in months. They trade small talk first: she complains about groundhogs eating her dahlia beds, he complains about the neighbor who keeps dropping off broken lawnmowers to fix without even bringing a six pack as thanks. When he spills a dollop of chili on the knee of his jeans, she leans over the table, dabbing at it with a crumpled napkin, and her hand brushes his when he tries to wave her off. The jasmine perfume she’s wearing mixes with the faint smell of rose clippings on her sleeves, and he feels a jolt run up his arm that has nothing to do with the old electrical burns he still carries.
Guilt hits him a second later, sharp as a taser. He shouldn’t be noticing how her eyes crinkle when she laughs, shouldn’t be thinking about how warm her hand was when it brushed his, shouldn’t be sitting here having a good time when Ellie’s been gone eight years. He goes quiet, staring down at his chili, and she tilts her head, like she can see the thoughts spinning in his head.
When the cookoff wraps up, the band packing up their gear, the last of the crowd hauling coolers to their trucks, she nods toward the tree line at the back of the fairgrounds. “Wanna walk down to the creek? The herons are usually out this time of night, and the blackberries along the bank are just ripe.”
He hesitates for three full seconds, then nods.
They walk slow, the grass crinkling under their boots with the first faint frost of the season, crickets chirping loud enough to drown out traffic from the main road a half mile away. She points out a great blue heron standing stock-still in the shallow creek water, waiting for a minnow to swim by, and stops at a thick bush heavy with dark, glossy blackberries. She plucks one, holds it out to him between her thumb and forefinger, the setting sun turning the skin of her hand golden. “You always loved these. Ellie used to talk about how you’d sneak out at 7 a.m. to pick them before the birds got ‘em.”
His throat feels tight. He’d forgotten she knew that. He reaches out, takes the berry from her, his calloused fingers brushing her palm, and he doesn’t yank his hand back like he expects himself to. “I haven’t had one since….” He trails off, doesn’t need to finish the sentence.
She nods, like she gets it. “I get it. After my ex left, I didn’t let anyone even bring me a coffee for three years. Thought I didn’t deserve to feel good about anything, like I was betraying the life I thought I was gonna have.” She plucks another blackberry, pops it in her mouth, juice staining her lower lip purple. “Ellie would kick your ass if she saw you holed up in that house alone, fixing broken lawnmowers for deadbeats and never talking to anyone. You know that, right?”
He stares at her for a long minute, the sky turning pink and orange over the cornfields across the creek, and he knows she’s right. The guilt doesn’t disappear all at once, but it softens, just a little, like ice thawing in the spring sun. He reaches out, tucks a stray strand of hair that fell in her face behind her ear, his thumb brushing her cheekbone. She leans into the touch, like she’s been waiting for it.
She lifts his hand, the one that held the blackberry, and licks a smudge of purple juice off the pad of his thumb.
