Leo Rios, 58, retired high school woodshop teacher, sits at a splintered pine picnic table at the county’s weekly summer beer garden, the hem of his faded charcoal flannel dotted with fine cedar sawdust, a half-drunk hazy IPA sweating into the chipped red plastic tabletop. He’s sanding the edges of a small birdhouse, 120-grit paper rough under calloused fingers, for the maker space he volunteers at every Saturday— the one he helped build out of an old auto body shop three years after his wife Mary died. He hasn’t gone on a date since the funeral, has told every friend who’s tried to set him up the same line: his routine’s too tight, his workshop’s too messy, he doesn’t have room for anyone new to mess up the rhythm he’s carved out for himself. It’s not a lie, exactly, but it’s not the whole truth either, the part he won’t admit out loud even to himself, that he’s scared he’ll forget the lilt of Mary’s laugh if he lets someone else’s take up space in his house.
The beer garden’s packed this Tuesday, air thick with the smell of grilled bratwurst and freshly cut fescue, kids chasing each other with glow sticks that leave neon green and pink streaks in the fading light, a scruffy cover band playing 90s country off to the side of the fairground. He doesn’t look up when someone slides onto the bench across from him until he smells coconut sunscreen and cherry hard seltzer, so familiar it makes his chest tight, and when he lifts his head, she’s grinning at him, the same tiny gap between her two front teeth he remembers from the first time they met, when she was 17 and showed up to his and Mary’s first Christmas together with a suitcase full of thrifted Nirvana tees and a jar of moonshine her dad had brewed in their backyard shed. Her name’s Lila, she’s Mary’s first cousin, 42, just moved back to town after a messy divorce from a corporate lawyer in Chicago, he’d heard through the family grapevine a month earlier but hadn’t reached out, too nervous about what he might say, what he might feel.
She leans forward to say hi, her elbow brushing his knee where his work jeans are ripped at the seam, and he drops the sandpaper he’s holding, it skittering across the table until her hand wraps around it, her fingers brushing his when she passes it back. Her nails are painted chipped mint green, the exact same shade she wore to the funeral, he remembers, because she’d sat next to him in the front pew and squeezed his hand so hard her nail polish had left a faint green mark on his skin for three days after. Her eyes are hazel, flecked with gold, and she holds eye contact longer than she should, like she’s waiting for him to say something, to acknowledge the crackle of quiet tension that’s always hung between them, the thing Mary used to tease him about when they were alone, saying Lila had a giant schoolgirl crush on him that she thought was adorable, not threatening.
She leans in so close her breath is warm on his ear, the coconut scent of her sunscreen dizzying, and says she’s been thinking about him since she moved back, that Mary called her two weeks before the car crash, told her if anything ever happened, she should make sure Leo didn’t lock himself away in his workshop forever, that he deserved to be happy even if she wasn’t there. She rests her hand on his forearm, her palm warm through the thin flannel, and he doesn’t pull away, doesn’t make an excuse to leave, just looks at her, at the gap between her teeth, the chipped mint nail polish, the way she’s smiling like she already knows what he’s going to say. For the first time in seven years, he doesn’t feel guilty for wanting something for himself, doesn’t feel like he’s betraying Mary by letting someone else in.
