Manny Rocha, 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, has avoided every small-town Oregon community event for 18 years on principle. His ex-wife runs the bake sale at every single one, and he’s still bitter enough about her leaving him for his hunting buddy three weeks after their daughter left for college that he’d rather stay home sanding custom cutting boards than make small talk with people who picked her side. The only reason he’s at the July street fair now is his 12-year-old granddaughter begged him for blue raspberry cotton candy, and he’s never once told that kid no.
He’s ducking the main thoroughfare, where he can see his ex in a floral apron yelling at a kid who knocked over a tray of chocolate chip cookies, when he steps sideways into the used book booth and sends a stack of dog-eared western paperbacks crashing to the wooden planks. He bends to grab them at the same time as the woman running the booth, and their knuckles brush hard. He feels the rough, garden-calloused edge of her skin before he sees her face, catches a whiff of lavender hand cream and lemon Pledge, and freezes.
It’s Lila Marlow, his ex-wife’s younger sister, the kid who used to show up at his house every Saturday when she was 16, begging him to teach her how to build birdhouses for her 4H competitions. He hasn’t seen her in 20 years, not since he skipped his ex’s family Christmas to go fishing after she told him she was leaving. He’s halfway to apologizing and bolting before she laughs, a warm, throaty sound he remembers from back when she’d sneak beer from his garage when her sister wasn’t looking, and doesn’t pull her hand away.
She’s 58 now, he remembers, auburn hair streaked with gray pulled back in a messy braid, freckles across her nose that haven’t faded, wearing a faded John Deere hoodie and cutoff jeans that show a scar on her left knee from the time she crashed the four-wheeler on his property back in 1998. She holds his hand for half a beat too long, her thumb brushing the scar on his own knuckle from a table saw accident when he was 40, and says she recognized him the second he walked into the booth, has been asking the neighbors about him for months, ever since she moved back to town to take a part-time librarian job after her own divorce last year.
Manny’s throat goes tight. He knows the rules he made for himself after the divorce: no contact with anyone from his ex’s family, no exceptions, no matter how nice they used to be. He’s spent almost two decades living by that rule, turned down dinner invitations from old friends who still talked to his ex, skipped his granddaughter’s birthday party one year when he found out his ex was going to be there. But Lila’s leaning in now, close enough that he can smell the spearmint gum she’s chewing, her shoulder brushing his flannel shirt as she reaches to stack the westerns back on the table, and he can’t make himself step back.
She tells him she bought the old cottage on the edge of town, the one with the overgrown apple orchard, and she needs custom built-ins for the wall of books she hauled back with her from Portland. She says she knows it’s weird, asking him, but no one else in town does woodwork half as good as he does, and she’s never been scared of her sister’s temper anyway. Manny can hear the fair’s cover band playing a 1980s John Mellencamp track in the background, can taste the sugary dust from the cotton candy stand at the back of his throat, can feel the heat of Lila’s arm pressed to his as a group of kids runs past the booth, yelling.
Part of him feels sick, like he’s betraying some unspoken code he’s carried for half his life, like his ex would show up out of nowhere and scream at both of them for even talking. The other part of him, the part that’s been alone in that big empty house for 18 years, sanding cutting boards at 10 PM just to have something to do with his hands, can’t stop staring at the way she tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear when she laughs, the way her eyes crinkle at the corners when she teases him about still wearing the same beat up work boots he had back in the 90s.
He doesn’t say anything for a long second, then he reaches out, brushes a stray piece of grass off the shoulder of her hoodie, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her upper arm for just a second. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away, just holds his gaze, her smile softening a little. He says he’ll come look at the cottage tomorrow, after he drops his granddaughter off at her mom’s house, and he doesn’t even feel guilty when he says it, doesn’t feel the familiar twist of anger at the thought of his ex finding out.
He scrawls his cell number on the back of a tattered Louis L’Amour paperback he buys from her for a dollar, tucks the book in the pocket of his flannel shirt, and waves as he walks back toward the cotton candy stand where his granddaughter is jumping up and down, waving at him. He can feel the edge of the paperback digging into his chest through the shirt, can still feel the rough callus of Lila’s knuckle on his, the faint smell of lavender clinging to his fingertips.
When his granddaughter runs up to him, holding a cotton candy bigger than her head, he takes a bite, the blue sugar melting sweet on his tongue, and pulls out his phone to make sure the ringer is turned all the way up for tomorrow.
