Elroy Voss, 62, spent 28 years teaching high school metal shop before retiring three years ago to restore vintage cast iron cookware out of his garage workshop. He’s got a scar across his left knuckle from a 2010 table saw accident, and a rule he’s followed for 15 years, ever since his wife left him for his part-time teaching assistant: no messing with people tied to his closest friends, and no casual flirting that might lead to something he doesn’t have the energy to mess up. He’s stubborn about it, too, turns down every dinner setup his sister tries to arrange, says he’s too busy buffing out rust on 1930s Griswolds to make time for small talk.
He shows up to the Westside Fire Department’s annual chili cookoff just after 6 PM, carrying a 1950s Dutch oven he spent three weeks restoring for Chief Russ, his fishing buddy of 32 years. The parking lot is packed with pickup trucks, the air thick with cumin, wood smoke from the fire pit out back, and the sharp, yeasty smell of cheap beer sold out of a cooler by the volunteer firefighters. He’s planning to drop the pot off, grab one bowl of chili, and head home to finish a restoration for a customer in Texas, until he turns around from Russ’s table and slams straight into a woman holding a plastic cup of iced sweet tea.
The tea sloshes over the rim, soaking a three-inch spot on the cuff of his gray flannel shirt. She laughs, low and warm, and leans in before he can say it’s fine, dabbing at the wet spot with a crumpled paper napkin from her jeans pocket. Her forearm brushes his bicep as she works, and he catches a whiff of pecan shell and coconut sunscreen, even though it’s mid-October and the high that day only hit 58. She’s got silver streaks in her dark hair pulled back in a braid, and laugh lines crinkling at the corners of her hazel eyes when she looks up at him, holding his gaze a full two seconds longer than polite strangers do. “Sorry about that,” she says, nodding at his shirt. “Russ owes me a new cup, this one leaks.”
He finds out her name is Mara, she’s Russ’s first cousin from southern Illinois, in town for the week to help her aunt move into an assisted living facility, runs a 40-acre pecan orchard by herself. Russ drags him over to the picnic table she’s sitting at ten minutes later, shoves a bowl of chili in his hand, and tells him to stop hovering by the exit like he’s got a warrant out. Elroy sits, and five minutes in, her knee brushes his under the table, denim on denim, and she doesn’t shift away. He tenses up at first, tells himself he’s being an idiot, that he doesn’t need this, that Russ would rib him for six months if he so much as looked at his cousin wrong. But then she asks about the faint scar on his knuckle, and he finds himself telling her about the table saw accident, about his cast iron business, about the 12-year-old granddaughter who comes to his shop every Saturday to paint tiny flowers on the lids of the smaller skillets he sells for kids’ play kitchens.
She leans in when he talks, nods like she actually cares what he’s saying, and when he pulls out his phone to show her a photo of the Griswold he just finished restoring for his granddaughter’s birthday, her hand covers his for half a second, warm and calloused, before she pulls back to zoom in on the photo. He can feel his face heat up, hasn’t felt that dumb, giddy flutter in his chest since he was a teenager asking his first girlfriend to prom.
By the time the sun dips below the trees and the annual fall festival fireworks start, most of the crowd has wandered out to the empty field behind the fire station. The air’s gotten cold enough that he can see his breath when he laughs, and he remembers he’s got an extra fleece throw in the back of his F-150, left over from a fishing trip last month. He offers it to her, and when she wraps it around her shoulders she tugs the collar up to her nose, grinning. “Smells like your shop,” she says. “Like mineral oil and that cinnamon apple cider you said you drink while you work.” He didn’t even remember mentioning the cider.
They stand a few feet away from the rest of the crowd, far enough that the noise of people cheering when the blue and silver fireworks burst is muffled. A red firework goes off, painting the whole sky pink, and he spots a dry maple leaf stuck in the end of her braid. He lifts his hand before he can think better of it, brushes it out, and his knuckle grazes her cheek. She tilts her head into his touch, and then she’s kissing him, slow, no hurry, the crackle of the fireworks fading to background noise for a second, her hand curled around the back of his neck, the fleece soft under his other hand when he rests it on her waist.
She’s driving back to Illinois the next afternoon. They exchange numbers before she leaves the cookoff, she hands him a crinkly paper bag full of fresh shelled pecans from her orchard, tells him to send her a photo of the next cast iron piece he finishes. He drives home, leaves the Dutch oven he brought for Russ by the door, drops the pecans on his kitchen counter, and spends an hour puttering around his shop before he remembers to text her a photo of the pecan bag sitting next to his buffer. She texts back two minutes later, a selfie of her wearing his fleece, propped up against the pillows in her hotel room, grinning.
He sets his phone down on the workbench, runs a finger over the rough, ridged edge of a pecan shell he pulled out of the bag, and realizes he hasn’t felt this light since the week before his ex-wife moved out.
