Milo Rourke is 61, spent 38 years as a highway striping crew foreman before he retired two years back, his hands permanently crisscrossed with faint scar tissue and flecked with sun-bleached yellow and white paint that no amount of Lava soap will ever scrub off. His biggest flaw, the one his fishing buddies rib him about every Saturday at the lake, is that he’s hidden himself away from anything resembling casual social connection since his wife Ellen passed from breast cancer eight years prior. He avoids church potlucks, neighborhood cookouts, even the annual VFW fish fry he once never missed, sick of the pitying side glances and the “you doing okay, buddy?” questions that feel more like performance than concern. He only showed up to this one because his buddy Jimmie owed him a favor for fixing his F-150’s alternator in the rain last month, and Jimmie had begged him to come help haul the folding tables after the event wrapped.
He’s perched on the end of the bar, picking at a plate of overfried catfish and sipping sweet tea that’s so sugary it makes his teeth ache, when he sees her trip over the leg of a folding chair three feet away. She’s carrying a stack of neon flyers for the county library’s summer reading program, new in town three months, the librarian everyone in the local Facebook group had complained was “too stuck up” and “fresh out of some fancy New England college” when she’d moved into the old craftsman on Oak Street. She stumbles forward, one hand shooting out to grab his forearm to steady herself, her palm cool through the thin cotton of his work shirt, a faint blue ink stain blotted across her knuckle. She smells like lemon Pledge and old paper, the same scent Ellen used to have when she’d come home from her part-time job at the small town library they’d had back when they lived in Georgia.
She apologizes, leaning in close enough that her silver hoop earring brushes the edge of his shoulder, holding eye contact for a beat longer than polite, no pity in her dark brown eyes, just a flicker of amusement at her own clumsiness. He grunts that it’s fine, goes back to picking at his catfish, fully expecting her to walk away. Instead she pulls out the empty bar stool next to him, sets her stack of flyers down, and nods at his hands, asking where all the paint flecks came from.
He tells her, at first short, clipped answers, the way he talks to strangers who only want to make small talk before they ask about Ellen. But she doesn’t ask about his wife. She asks about the longest stretch of highway he ever striped in one shift, about the worst weather he ever worked through, laughs so hard she snorts when he tells her about the flock of Canada geese that landed in a fresh coat of yellow paint on I-75 outside of Macon in 2017, leaving tiny yellow webbed footprints stretching three miles down the northbound lane before anyone could chase them off. He doesn’t notice at first that her knees are almost touching his under the bar, that she keeps brushing her wrist against his when she reaches for her iced tea, that she’s leaning in so close he can see the flecks of gray in her dark hair, the tiny laugh lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes.
For a second he’s disgusted with himself, hot shame crawling up the back of his neck. He hasn’t felt this light, this interested in talking to anyone, in eight years, feels like he’s betraying Ellen by even enjoying the conversation. He almost makes up an excuse to leave, to haul the tables and go home to his empty house and his old westerns, when she reaches across the bar and brushes her thumb across the thick, raised scar on the back of his left hand, the one he got when a paint sprayer blew up on him in 2009, and asks if he’d come to the library next Wednesday to tell the geese story to the summer reading kids, who are doing a month of programming on weird local history.
He freezes, the excuse sitting on the tip of his tongue, and then he nods, says yes, no hesitation.
They talk for another hour, the crowd at the fish fry thinning out, Jimmie waving at him from the door with a stupid knowing grin before he leaves with his wife, leaving Milo to handle the table haul on his own later. When the bartender starts stacking chairs on the tables to close up, she walks out to his beat-up 2008 Silverado with him, the air thick with the smell of cut grass and residual fried catfish, fireflies blinking low across the VFW’s parking lot. She pulls a scrap of library receipt out of her pocket, scrawls her cell number on the back, not the main library line, her handwriting loopy and slanted, and tells him to text her if he wants to get coffee at the diner on Main Street earlier that day to go over what he wants to say to the kids.
He tucks the receipt into the inside pocket of his worn leather work vest, right next to the folded photo of Ellen he’s kept there since she died. He leans against the hood of his truck, watching her small silver sedan pull out of the parking lot, and takes a slow sip of the leftover sweet tea he’d grabbed from the bar on his way out. The taste is still cloyingly sweet, but for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t mind it.
