Eli Pasternak is 62, spent 28 years teaching high school metal shop before he retired three years ago, now forges custom horseshoe wall art and boot jacks out of his garage outside Lancaster, Ohio. His worst flaw is he holds grudges longer than he holds a welding torch steady—he’s carried a chip on his shoulder about his late wife’s younger cousin Mara for 18 years, convinced she’d bailed on driving his wife to her first chemo appointment when he had to cover a last-minute shop field trip. He only dragged himself to the county’s annual summer beer fest this weekend because his 7-year-old granddaughter was showing her prize silkie chicken in the 4-H pet parade, and he couldn’t say no to her pigtailed begging.
The August air hangs thick with hop dust, fried oreo grease, and the sharp, sweet tang of cut clover when he leans against the craft beer tent rail, waiting for a cold kölsch. A woman in a rumpled linen button-down and scuffed work boots bumps into his side, half her amber ale sloshing over the rim onto his faded Carhartt jeans. He’s halfway to a gruff retort when he meets her eyes, and the words die in his throat. It’s Mara. She’s 54 now, auburn hair streaked with silver at the temples, ink stains on her fingers from the book restoration work she’s done for decades on the east coast. She freezes for half a second, then her shoulders slump, no attempt to step back and create distance between them.
She apologizes first, reaches into her canvas tote for a handful of napkins, leans down to dab at the beer stain on his calf, her knuckles brushing the fine hair on his leg through the denim. He flinches, not from discomfort, but from the sharp, warm jolt the contact sends up his spine, a feeling he hasn’t had since his wife was alive. He brings up the chemo appointment before he can stop himself, voice sharp enough to cut over the bluegrass band playing two tents over. Mara’s jaw tightens, and she tells him she was in a car crash on the way to pick his wife up that day, t-boned at a stop sign by a kid texting and driving, broke her left arm and three ribs, spent 12 hours in the ER with no cell service and no one’s emergency contact memorized except her mom’s. His wife never told him, she says, because she didn’t want him to stress about it while he was chaperoning 17 rowdy teens at a welding competition.
The grudge he’s carried for almost two decades fizzles out faster than a wet match. He’s embarrassed, for one, but underneath that, there’s the same quiet hum of attraction he’d tried to stomp out when he was in his 40s, when Mara would come over for family dinners and laugh so hard at his terrible shop jokes she’d snort, and he’d have to look away before he stared too long. She stays close, hip almost pressed to his, as she orders him a fresh beer, passes it to him with a calloused thumb brushing his wrist. He can smell lavender from her shampoo under the smell of beer and fried food, see the faint freckles across her nose he’d forgotten about, the tiny scar above her left eyebrow from when she’d fallen off his horse at a family cookout in 2001.
He suggests they walk over to the empty bleachers by the creek to talk, away from the crowd. They sit so close their knees knock together every time one of them shifts, and neither moves away. She tells him she moved back to the area two months ago to take care of her mom, who’s got early stage dementia, and she’s been working out of a small studio above the downtown bookstore. She admits, quiet enough that he almost misses it over the sound of the creek gurgling, that she’d had a crush on him since she was 20, never said anything because he was happily married, and she’d never cross that line. He tells her he’d thought about her too, more times than he’d ever admit out loud before, felt guilty for it for years, like he was betraying his wife’s memory.
She reaches up to brush a firefly off the shoulder of his flannel shirt, her fingers lingering on his forearm for three full beats before she pulls away. He doesn’t flinch this time. He tells her he’s got a stack of old, beat-up western novels in his garage that need re-binding, if she’s interested in taking a look sometime, and that he’s got a new batch of horseshoe art he’s been working on, if she wants to come see it after the fest wraps up. She grins, the same snort-laugh he remembers bubbling out when he makes a dumb joke about how he still has that horse she fell off, now fat and lazy and living in his back pasture.
He buys her a plate of fried oreos dusted with powdered sugar, and they split them while they watch the bluegrass band wrap up their set. Their fingers brush when they both reach for the last oreo at the same time, and she doesn’t pull her hand away, laces her fingers through his for three slow beats before she grabs the cookie and takes a bite, powdered sugar sticking to her lower lip. He leans in, swipes the sugar off with the pad of his thumb, and tastes it off his skin before he stands, holding out his hand to pull her up with him.
