Rafe Mendez, 59, retired diesel locomotive engineer, had only agreed to come to the Carbondale summer street fair to get his little sister off his back. She’d been nagging him for six months straight to stop hiding out in his cottage with his collection of restored train lanterns and his 12-year-old hound dog, to stop turning down every invite that didn’t involve a parts swap meet for 1970s freight engine components. He’d planned to sneak out after 20 minutes, grab a pulled pork sandwich from the food truck by the lot, and head home to watch the Cardinals game, but a sudden mid-afternoon thunderstorm hit out of nowhere, dumping sheets of rain that turned the fairground gravel to mud in 90 seconds flat. He ducked under the closest awning, the one for the local craft brewery’s pop-up tent, and squeezed between a group of rowdy SIU undergrads in neon fanny packs and a woman he’d actively avoided for three months straight.
Lena Hart, 56, owned the Peach Pit, the new specialty pie shop that’d opened downtown in March. She was also the ex-wife of Jake Hart, his old union rep, the man Rafe had almost come to blows with back in 2013 over a garbage contract that left half the senior locomotive engineers short on overtime pay for six months. Rafe had avoided her shop, avoided the downtown block it was on, even changed his usual coffee run to skip the corner next to it, just so he wouldn’t have to run into anyone tied to that mess. But the tent was packed shoulder to shoulder, no room to edge away, and every time someone jostled her from behind, her bare arm brushed his sun-warmed bicep, sending a jolt he hadn’t felt in years up his spine.
She looked over after the third bump, silver hoop earrings catching the tent’s string lights, and smirked like she knew exactly who he was and why he was trying to make himself as small as possible. “You’re Rafe, right? Jake used to rant about you for hours. Called you the most stubborn son of a bitch on the Illinois Central line.”
Rafe huffed, twisting the label off his cold IPA with his thumb, the calluses on his fingers catching on the paper. “Had good reason to be stubborn. That contract he pushed through would’ve put half of us out of work before we could hit retirement.”
He blinked, caught off guard. He’d spent a decade resenting anyone tied to Jake, had built up a whole little narrative in his head that his ex-wife would be just as arrogant, just as willing to screw over the guys who actually did the work, and here she was agreeing with him. The wind picked up, blowing a spray of cold rain under the awning, and she shivered, leaning closer to him without thinking, her shoulder pressed firm to his. He could smell her perfume, jasmine and vanilla, mixed with the faint, sweet tang of peach pie filling that clung to the frayed edge of her apron string peeking out from under her faded Lynyrd Skynyrd tee. When she lifted her hand to tuck a strand of rain-damp blonde hair behind her ear, her knuckles brushed his stubbled jaw, and both of them froze, holding eye contact for three full seconds, neither looking away. Half of him screamed to make an excuse, to bolt the second the rain let up, to hold onto the grudge he’d nursed for 10 years like a security blanket. The other half couldn’t remember the last time a woman looked at him like that, like she was amused by him, curious, not just tolerating his grumpy silence.
He hesitated for half a second, then nodded, pulling his wallet out of his jeans pocket before she could argue. They found a dry spot on a splintered picnic table under the pavilion, and she took the first bite, getting a crumb of fried dough stuck on the corner of her chin. He reached over without thinking, wiping it off with his thumb, his skin lingering on her soft cheek for a beat longer than necessary. She smiled, leaning into the touch just a little, and told him she’d been meaning to track him down for weeks, that she’d heard he restored old train lanterns, and she wanted to buy three or four to hang over the counter at her pie shop. He told her he had a whole shelf of them in his garage, fully rewired, ready to hang, and she could come by his place tomorrow after she closed up shop to pick out whatever she wanted, no charge.
The band struck up the first chords of “Sweet Home Alabama” a minute later, and she nudged his scuffed work boot with her white sneaker under the table, raising an eyebrow. “You dance, Mendez?”
He laughed, shaking his head. He hadn’t danced since his wedding day, 23 years prior, before his wife got sick, before he buried himself in his work and his grudges and his quiet little cottage on the edge of town. But he stood up anyway, wiping his hands on his jeans, and held out his calloused, grease-stained hand to her. She took it, her palm soft but with faint calluses along her fingers from kneading pie dough for 12 hours a day, and he led her out to the patch of grass that was just starting to dry off under the fairy lights strung between the oak trees.
