Elroy Mendez, 62, retired high school woodshop teacher turned vintage porch swing restorer, swiped sweat off his brow with the back of a grease-stained flannel sleeve and squinted at the line of fairgoers trundling past his craft tent. The August air in western North Carolina reeked of fried Oreos, cut grass, and the pine that still clung to the sawdust under his fingernails, the whine of the Ferris wheel’s gears mixing with the twang of a cover band playing 90s country three tents over. He’d dragged four restored swings to the county fair that morning, each sanded smooth, stained a warm honey oak, carved with tiny mountain laurel blooms along the armrests—his late wife Clara’s favorite flower. He’d avoided this fair for 12 years, ever since he’d run into Maren Hale here, the woman he’d blamed for Clara’s death for nearly two decades, and left before she could say a single word.
He looked up, and there she was. She stood ten feet from the tent, holding a paper plate half-full of peach cobbler, her silver hair braided down her back, wearing a faded linen button-down tied at the waist, frayed denim cutoffs, and scuffed brown cowboy boots. A smudge of pink pie filling streaked the curve of her left jaw. She was 60, he remembered, and he’d not spoken a full sentence to her since two days after Clara’s solo hiking trip in 2006, when he’d screamed at her on his front porch for encouraging Clara to go alone when the forecast called for flash floods. She hadn’t argued then, just turned and left, and he’d blocked her number, unfriended her on Facebook, avoided every mutual friend event she might attend.
She spotted him, hesitated for half a second, then walked toward the tent. He tensed, his hands curling into fists at his sides, ready to tell her to leave. She stopped a foot away from the swing closest to her, close enough that he could smell the lavender of her lotion mixed with the cinnamon from her cobbler, and reached out to run a finger along the carved laurel on the armrest. Her forearm brushed his when she leaned in, warm through the thin fabric of his shirt, and he didn’t pull away.
“Clara always said you’d make these to sell someday,” she said, her voice softer than he remembered, no edge to it. “I’ve been looking for one for three years. I promised her I’d put one on my porch, if you ever started selling them.”
He blinked, confused. He’d always thought Maren had pushed Clara to take that trip, had told her she deserved a break from his grumpy post-retirement mood, had even helped her pack her backpack. “I thought you told her to go,” he said, his voice rougher than he intended.
Maren pulled her hand back like she’d been burned, and for the first time he saw the faint scar above her right eyebrow, the one she’d gotten when she and Clara had crashed a golf cart in their 20s. “I begged her not to go,” she said, quiet enough that the fair noise almost swallowed the words. “I hid her hiking boots. She found them. I told her the weather service was warning about 3 inches of rain in three hours. She said she’d be fine, that she needed to clear her head. I felt guilty for 18 years that I didn’t hide them better.”
Elroy’s throat went tight. He’d spent almost half his life carrying that anger, that sharp, cold disgust aimed straight at her, and it had all been a lie. He bought her a lemonade from the food truck next door, and they sat side by side on the largest swing he’d brought, their knees knocking every time a breeze pushed the swing a little, the cold condensation from the paper cups dripping onto their jeans. They talked for two hours, about the woodshop students he still ran into at the grocery store, about the native plant nursery she ran out of her backyard, about Clara’s terrible habit of burning pancakes every Sunday morning. He noticed the way she tucked a stray strand of silver hair behind her ear when she laughed, the way her thumb brushed the back of his hand when she passed him the lemonade, the crinkles at the corners of her eyes when she talked about the wild azaleas she planted every spring.
The sun dipped below the mountains, painting the sky pink and tangerine, and the fair’s string lights flickered on, strung between every tent. Maren leaned in a little, her shoulder pressing against his, and rested her hand on his forearm for a long second, her palm warm through his flannel. “I always thought you were the kindest man I ever knew,” she said, quiet, like she was scared to say it out loud. “Even when you were mad at me.”
He didn’t move away. He looked her in the eye for the first time all night, and realized the sharp, warm feeling bubbling up in his chest wasn’t guilt, wasn’t anger, it was desire, something he’d thought had died with Clara 18 years prior. He didn’t feel wrong for it, didn’t feel like he was betraying anyone. He’d spent long enough holding onto hate.
