Moe Sorrentino, 62, retired first-class lineman for West Penn Power, has sat at the far left stool of the New Kensington VFW bar every Friday for seven years, ever since his wife Jan passed from lung cancer. He’s got a gimpy left knee from a 2018 fall off a utility pole during an ice storm, a scar that splits his left eyebrow, and a rule he’s never broken: no flirting, no dates, no messing around with the kind of small-town loneliness that makes people do stupid things they’ll regret come Saturday morning. He orders the same thing every week: two pieces of fried cod, extra malt vinegar, a side of hushpuppies dusted with cayenne, and a draft Yuengling, no ice. The bar smells like old grease, cigarette smoke that’s seeped into the pine wood grain for 40 years, and the faint sweet tang of the apple butter the auxiliary ladies sell for the post’s veteran support fund. The beat-up jukebox hums Johnny Cash deep in the background, the speakers crackling every time the bass hits on *Folsom Prison Blues*.
He notices Lena the first week she’s working. She’s 58, the post commander’s cousin, moved back from central Florida three weeks prior after her divorce from a golf pro who left her for a 28-year-old cart girl. She wears faded gray flannel shirts, steel-toe work boots caked in mud from the small community garden she tends on weekends, and has a sunflower tattoo curling around her left wrist, the ink faded soft at the edges from 20 years of sun exposure. She brings his order over without him asking the first time, her calloused fingers (rough from decades of pulling weeds and hauling mulch) brushing his when she sets the frosty beer mug down in front of him. He freezes. His first thought is that he’s being an idiot, a 62-year-old widower getting flustered over a woman just because she remembered his order. His second thought is that her laugh, when she teases the regular at the next stool for shoving three packets of tartar sauce into his jacket pocket, sounds like the crickets he used to listen to on his back porch when Jan was alive, warm and familiar, like something he’d forgotten he missed.
He avoids her for the next two Fridays. Drives 20 minutes out of his way to a run-down fish shack in Tarentum instead, even though their cod is soggy, their hushpuppies are undercooked, and their beer is served warm. He tells himself he’s being loyal, that even thinking about talking to another woman is a betrayal of the 34 years he had with Jan. That it’s tacky, even, two people pushing 60 acting like horny high schoolers with nothing better to do. But he can’t stop replaying the brush of her fingers, the way she’d held eye contact for a beat too long before she walked away, the flecks of gold in her green eyes when the bar’s neon Pabst sign hit them right. He spends the week fixing a riding mower for the widow down the street, his knee throbbing the whole time he’s bent over the engine, and keeps replaying the offhand comment he’d heard her make to the commander the first week he saw her: her push mower died two days prior, and she couldn’t afford to pay someone to fix it.
He shows up at the VFW the next Friday with a jar of his homemade pickled banana peppers tucked under his arm, the kind Jan used to help him can every August when the peppers from their garden were ripe. She’s wiping down the bar when he walks in, and she grins so wide her cheeks dimple. “Thought you’d ghosted for good,” she says, leaning across the bar to take the jar from him, her arm brushing his bad knee when she reaches for the napkin stack next to his stool. Her hair smells like rosemary, he notices, and the cuff of her flannel is frayed at the edge, singed a little from a recent campfire. He mumbles something about hearing her mower was broken, offers to fix it for free the next morning, no strings attached. She writes her address on a napkin, her handwriting messy and slanted, and tucks it into the front pocket of his work flannel, her fingers brushing the old scar on his chest from the time he got hit with a loose utility line in 2009.
Her little ranch house is on the edge of town, surrounded by raised garden beds full of kale and pumpkins and late-season tomatoes, the porch lined with potted mint and lavender that smells like summer even in late October. He fixes the mower in 15 minutes, the carburetor had just been gunked up with old gas left sitting over the winter, and she brings him a glass of sweet iced tea when he’s done, the glass cold and sweating through the paper napkin wrapped around it. They sit on the weathered wooden porch steps next to each other, their knees pressed together through the thick fabric of their work jeans, and she tells him about Florida, about the golf pro, about how she’d moved back because she missed the way the Allegheny hills turned burnt orange and red in the fall. He tells her about Jan, about the lineman job, about how he’d thought he’d never want to talk to another woman like this for as long as he lived. He’s expecting her to pull away, to call him weird, to tell him he’s not over his wife, but she just nods, and leans in, and kisses him slow. It tastes like peppermint and iced tea, and his knee doesn’t even throb when he shifts closer to her, his hand brushing the sunflower tattoo on her wrist.
They show up to the fish fry the next Friday together, and the regulars hoot and holler when she sits down next to him on his usual stool instead of clocking in behind the bar. He lets her steal a bite of his hushpuppy, and she slips an extra piece of perfectly crispy cod onto his plate when the bartender isn’t looking. The commander claps him on the back on his way to the jukebox, says he knew the two of them would hit it off the second he brought Lena in to apply for the cook job. Moe doesn’t say anything. He laces his calloused, scarred hand around hers where it rests on the sticky bar top, and doesn’t even flinch when the jukebox skips a full verse of his favorite Cash track.
