Rafe Mendez is 62, a retired lineman who spent 38 years climbing utility poles for the Washington County electric co-op, and his biggest flaw is he’s spent the 18 years since his wife Linda died avoiding every small town social event he can. He only showed up to the Brenham Blueberry Festival beer tent because his 22-year-old niece begged him to man the local lineman association’s fundraiser booth for an hour, said the old guys couldn’t lift the cases of t-shirts on their own. He’s leaning against a splintered tent pole, nursing a lukewarm Shiner Bock, the air thick with the smell of fried Oreos, cut grass, and sweet blueberry syrup dripping off snow cones, when the first crush he ever had sits down two stools over.
He doesn’t recognize her at first, not until a group of rowdy teens cuts through the tent, one of them slamming into her shoulder so she slides across the vinyl bench, her bare upper arm brushing the thick, knotted scar that runs the length of his left forearm, the one he got patching downed lines during Hurricane Harvey. The heat of her skin seeps through the thin sheen of sweat on his arm, and he freezes. She glances over, smirks, and he’s hit with the memory of 1979, senior year, when she sat across from him in homeroom, passing him notes doodled with cartoon blue jays. Clara Hale. She moved to Austin after graduation, got married, taught elementary school art for 30 years, and he hasn’t seen her in person since Linda and he got married in 1981.
He snorts, takes a sip of beer, tries not to stare at the way her dimples show when she smiles. He’s fought the urge to reach out to her three separate times in the last two years, ever since he heard she moved back to town after her husband left her for a 28-year-old yoga instructor. The voice in his head always won, yammering about loyalty, about how Linda would be mad, about how everyone in town would talk. She orders a peach hard seltzer, and when she reaches for the glass the bartender slides across the counter, her hand brushes his again, and she doesn’t yank it away like she’s embarrassed. “I saw you fixing the fence on your property last week,” she says, leaning in so close he can smell her perfume, jasmine and cedar, like the woods behind the lake he used to camp at with Linda. “You still drive that beat up 2002 Ford F-150? I’d know that rust spot on the passenger door anywhere.”
He’s surprised anyone pays that much attention to him. Most days he only talks to his two rescue hounds and the cashier at the feed store. He admits he still has the truck, says the engine runs too good to get rid of it. She laughs, and the sound is warmer than the June sun beating down through the tent canvas. The band switches to a slow, swaying Patsy Cline track, and couples start filtering out of the tent to dance on the damp grass, still dewy from the afternoon thunderstorm. She stands up, wipes a stray drop of seltzer off her chin, and holds out her hand, her silver rings catching the fairy lights strung across the tent poles. “You owe me a dance, by the way. You stood me up for that coffee date 43 years ago. Don’t do it again.”
The voice in his head screams that he’s betraying Linda, that he’s too old for this, that everyone he knows is watching from the fundraiser booth 20 feet away. But then she says, soft enough only he can hear, “Linda told me, a year before she died. Said if I ever moved back to town and you were still moping around alone, I had permission to kick your ass until you stopped acting like you had to spend the rest of your life grieving. She always liked me better than your other female friends, anyway.”
The knot in his chest loosens so fast he feels lightheaded. He takes her hand, calloused from decades of holding paintbrushes, soft in the palm, and lets her pull him out to the dance area. The damp grass seeps through the holes in the toes of his work boots, and his knees creak a little when he wraps his other arm around her waist, pulls her close enough that he can feel her breath on his neck. They sway off-beat, neither of them very good at dancing, and he doesn’t even care when the old linemen at the booth start hooting, waving their t-shirts at him like overexcited teens.
When the song ends, they don’t pull apart. She tilts her head up, and he kisses her, slow, the taste of her peach seltzer mixing with the malt of his beer on their tongues, the distant sound of the band mixing with the cheers from the carnival rides down the field. When they pull apart, she laughs, tugs a stray piece of grass off the cuff of his flannel shirt, and asks if he wants to come over for breakfast tomorrow, says she picked three pounds of blueberries that morning and makes pancakes so fluffy they practically float off the plate. He nods, doesn’t let go of her hand. Somewhere behind them, his two hounds, which his niece had snuck into the festival against the rules, start barking, chasing a stray calico cat through the row of food trucks, and he doesn’t even bother to yell at them to stop.
