Eli Pasko, 62, retired high-voltage lineman, has spent the last 8 years sticking to a rigid routine of trimming oak and maple trees for elderly neighbors on the west side of Butler County, Pennsylvania, turning down every half-joking invite from friends to meet a widow or divorcee at the local bar. He’s convinced any romantic entanglement would be a betrayal of his wife Jan, who died of ovarian cancer in 2015, and he’s spent most of those years avoiding any situation that might put him in close quarters with a woman he finds himself drawn to.
He’s perched on a wobbly plastic folding chair at the township fire department’s annual summer beer tent, work boots crusted with pine sap and sawdust, a sweating Yuengling Lager in one calloused hand, when the seat next to him scrapes against the sawdust-covered tent floor. He doesn’t look up at first, assumes it’s one of his old line crew buddies coming to bug him about signing up for the charity cornhole tournament.
It’s Mara Hale. 58, recently hired as the town’s head librarian, Jan’s second cousin’s ex-wife, the woman he’d caught himself staring at three times in the last month at the Tractor Supply: once when she was loading bags of wildflower seed into her beat-up Subaru, twice when she was debating between two grades of sandpaper for a bookshelf she was building. He’d bolted for the checkout line both times, cheeks hot, furious at himself for even noticing the way her sun-bleached auburn hair fell in loose waves over her freckled shoulders.
He mumbles a hello back, takes a too-big sip of beer, lets the bitter fizz burn the back of his throat to distract himself from the fact that he can smell lavender shampoo and fried onion rings on her, warm and familiar. She tells him she just lost the blueberry pie contest by two points, the judge docked her for using too much lemon zest, and she snorts when she says it, the sound bright over the noise of the crowd. When she reaches across the table for a stack of napkins, her forearm brushes his, the skin of her wrist soft against the rough, scarred skin of his arm, and he flinches like he got zapped by a loose line, the same jolt he used to feel when he tested a live wire with the back of his hand.
He hates himself for it, hates that his first thought isn’t that this is Jan’s family, that he shouldn’t be here talking to her, but that he wants to feel that soft skin against his again. She pauses, looks at him for a long second, her dark eyes steady, no hint of embarrassment. “You wanna walk down to the creek?” she asks, nodding toward the treeline at the edge of the fairgrounds, where the fireflies are already starting to blink on in the dusk.
He hesitates for a full ten seconds, every alarm in his head blaring that this is wrong, that he’s disrespecting Jan, that everyone they know will see them and talk. Then he nods, stands up, his knees creaking a little from sitting on the cheap chair for an hour. They walk slow across the grass, the damp summer dew seeping through the holes in the toes of his work socks, and when they step over a gnarled hickory root half-buried in the dirt, her hand brushes his, and this time he doesn’t pull away.
She tells him she got divorced three years ago, moved out here to get away from her ex-husband’s constant yelling, that she’d remembered him from the family Christmas parties back in the early 2010s, how he’d always bring Jan’s famous dill pickles and sneak extra sugar cookies to the little kids. He admits he’s been avoiding her for months, that he thought even talking to her would be a betrayal, that he’s spent 8 years convinced he’s only allowed to be half-alive now. She laughs, soft, and stops on the wooden footbridge that crosses the shallow creek, the water gurgling quiet below them. “Jan would’ve kicked your ass for moping around alone this long,” she says, and it’s true, he can almost hear his wife saying the exact same thing, swatting him on the back of the head.
She holds up her left wrist, the blueberry pie smudge still glistening a little in the faint glow of the fairground string lights peeking through the trees. “Wanna taste the pie the judge thought was too tart?” she asks, and he leans in, slow, his lips brushing her wrist when he licks the smudge off, the sweet, bright flavor of blueberry and lemon zest bursting on his tongue. She doesn’t pull away, her free hand coming to rest light on his shoulder, her thumb brushing the edge of the faded lineman’s union patch sewn to the front of his work shirt. A firefly lands on the rail of the bridge next to his hand, blinking slow green in the dark.
