Thad Kroeger, 61, spent 28 years teaching high school woodshop outside Grand Rapids before retiring last year to run his custom cutting board business out of his two-car garage. He’s got scar tissue across the pad of his left thumb from a table saw accident his first year teaching, a habit of chewing on the end of a No. 2 pencil when he’s measuring grain, and a rule he’s stuck to rigidly since his ex-wife left him for a 38-year-old realtor eight years prior: no flirting, no dates, no unnecessary conversations with women that don’t involve pricing out a walnut board or negotiating apple pickup from his small orchard.
The Kent County Fall Harvest Festival was supposed to be a quick, profitable weekend. He’d loaded 72 finished boards into the bed of his 2008 Ford F-150 at 6 a.m. Saturday, set up his folding table under a pop-up canopy, and had already sold 11 by 10 a.m. when the jam booth set up next to him. At first, he was annoyed. The woman running it dragged her coolers so close to his table the corner dug into his calf when he leaned back, and the sweet, cloying smell of peach jam stuck to the linseed oil on his board samples, turning the earthy scent he liked cloying. He was two seconds from walking over to tell her to move her stuff when she knelt down to grab a jar that rolled under his table, her shoulder brushing the side of his jeans as she reached.
She stood up wiping jam-stained knuckles on her worn denim overalls, and he recognized her before she spoke. Clara Bennett, 55, younger sister of his old teaching partner, Greg, who he’d lost touch with when Greg moved to Florida five years prior. He hadn’t seen her since Greg’s 2012 wedding, where he’d made the couple’s charcuterie board as a gift. She held his gaze for two full beats, no polite half-smile, just a lazy smirk when she spotted the caramel apple crumbs stuck to the front of his plaid flannel. “You still eat those things so fast you look like a toddler with a lollipop,” she said, and he blinked, surprised she remembered that tiny, stupid detail from 11 years prior.
The bluegrass band at the far end of the festival grounds fired up a cover of a Johnny Cash song he’d danced to at his wedding, and he tensed, ready to make an excuse to go restock his change box and end the conversation. But she leaned against the edge of his table, crossing her ankles, and said she still used that charcuterie board he’d made, every single Sunday when she made breakfast for her kids. Her husband died of a sudden heart attack two years prior, she explained, she’d moved back to the area from Chicago to be closer to Greg, started the jam business to keep herself busy. He found himself talking before he could stop himself, telling her about the orchard, about the table saw accident, about the fact that his youngest daughter was having a baby next spring, he was building a crib out of reclaimed barn wood.
For half a second, his brain defaulted to the automatic no he’d given every social invitation for eight years. Then he looked at her, hair stuck to her forehead, a smudge of strawberry jam on her cheek, rain dripping off the brim of her baseball cap, and he nodded.
They sat in a vinyl booth at the back of the pub, her with a pint of amber ale, him with a bourbon on the rocks, the rain lashing against the fogged-up windows outside. She pulled a crumpled receipt from the pocket of her overalls, scribbled her phone number on the back of it in blue ballpoint, and slid it across the Formica table to him. “I’ve got a stack of old apple crates in my garage I want turned into pantry shelves,” she said, grinning when he picked the receipt up between his thumb and forefinger like it was something fragile. “I’ll pay you half in cash, half in peach jam, and I’ll make you meatloaf for dinner every night you’re working on them.”
He tucked the receipt into the inner pocket of his flannel, right next to the ultrasound photo of his granddaughter that his daughter had texted him the week prior. When she leaned across the table to grab a salted peanut from the bowl between them, her shoulder pressed warm and solid against his, and he didn’t shift away.
