Roman Voss, 62, spent 38 years as an air traffic controller out of Cleveland Hopkins before he retired three years prior. His entire career was built on split-second, low-margin calls that kept hundreds of people safe every shift, so he’d trained himself to eliminate all unnecessary risk from his personal life, too. Same fish fry at the VFW every Friday, same 7am tee time at the muni course every Saturday, same meatloaf for dinner every Sunday, no deviations, no surprises. His wife of 34 years had died of breast cancer in 2016, and he’d never so much as asked another woman out for coffee, convinced any kind of romantic entanglement would be a betrayal of the life they’d built.
He’s halfway through his usual plate of crispy breaded perch, doused in malt vinegar, a frosty root beer sweating on the Formica table beside him, when he spots her across the room. Lila Marlow, 58, Jake’s widow. He’d only spoken to her a handful of times, all at work holiday parties or Jake’s funeral, but he’d carried a quiet, unspoken crush on her for 22 years, ever since he’d seen her laugh so hard at a terrible joke Jake told at the 2001 FAA banquet that she’d snort-laughed into her eggnog. He’d never let himself act on it, of course—Jake was his favorite guy to work midnights with, the only pilot who never yelled when Roman had to divert him last minute in a thunderstorm. Jake had died in a Cessna crash on a fishing trip 18 months prior, and Roman had avoided the obituary, avoided the memorial, avoided any mention of him for months, guilt coiled tight in his chest for the stupid, useless crush he’d held on his friend’s wife for decades.
She waves when she catches him staring, and he freezes, fork halfway to his mouth. He considers pretending he didn’t see her, but she’s already standing, grabbing her plate of catfish, walking over to his corner table. The jukebox in the corner is spitting out Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” and the room smells like fried batter, cheap beer, and the pine air freshener hanging by the front door. She pulls out the chair across from him, sits, and the knee of her worn work jeans brushes his under the table for half a second, sending a jolt up his spine he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager sneaking into drive-ins with his high school girlfriend.
“Thought that was you,” she says, and her voice is lower than he remembers, rougher, like she’s spent the last week yelling over power tools. She’s wearing a faded AC/DC t-shirt under a plaid flannel, her streaky gray hair pulled back in a messy braid, and there’s a smudge of potting soil on her left cheek. She tells him she moved back to town two weeks prior, bought the old family-run garden center on Main Street, had been tearing out rotting raised beds and rewiring the greenhouse nonstop since she closed the sale. They talk about Jake first, about the time he’d brought a cooler of homemade IPA to the tower on New Year’s Eve 2010, when all the flights had been grounded due to a blizzard, about how he’d once landed a small prop plane in a cornfield after a bird strike, walked away without a scratch and stopped for a cheeseburger on the way home. Roman’s guard slips a little, and he finds himself laughing, leaning forward across the table, forgetting to check the clock above the bar every ten minutes like he usually does to make sure he’s on schedule to be home by 9.
When she reaches for a stack of paper napkins at the same time he does, their hands brush. Her palm is calloused, warm, and he doesn’t pull away for three full seconds, before he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned, his face hot. He expects to feel that familiar twist of guilt, the self-disgust at even thinking about touching his friend’s widow, but all he feels is a low, thrumming excitement, the kind he hasn’t felt in decades.
“I know this is weird,” she says, like she can read his mind, leaning in a little closer, her elbow brushing his. Her perfume smells like lavender and tomato vine, sharp and sweet, the same scent that used to cling to Jake’s work shirts when he’d come back from a weekend at home. “Jake used to tease me about it, actually. Said you were the only controller he trusted, and that if anything ever happened to him, I should find you, because you’d never let anything bad happen to me. Said he knew you’d had a thing for me since 2001, thought it was funny, not weird.”
Roman stares at her, stunned. He’d always thought he’d hidden it so well, that no one had ever noticed. She laughs, the same snort-laugh he’d remembered from that banquet, and reaches across the table, taps the back of his hand lightly. “I’ve had a thing for you too, for the record. Thought you hated me, the way you’d always leave the room as soon as I walked up to talk to Jake.”
He sits there for a minute, processing, the hum of the bar around him fading to background noise. The guilt doesn’t disappear entirely, but it softens, melts away a little, replaced by something lighter, something like hope. He tells her he’s good with small repairs, that he fixes old lawnmowers for the guys at the VFW in his spare time, and she asks him if he can come by the garden center tomorrow, help her fix the old wind chime Jake had made out of scrap plane parts, that it got bent in the move. He says yes before he can overthink it, before he can talk himself out of it.
He walks her out to her beat-up Ford F150 in the gravel parking lot, the cool spring air biting at his cheeks. She hands him a crumpled slip of paper with her address scrawled on it in blue ballpoint, leans up, and kisses him on the cheek, her lips soft against his gray stubble. “9am okay?” she says, climbing into the truck. He nods, can’t think of anything to say, so he just waves as she pulls out of the lot, taillights fading down the dark two-lane road.
He tucks the slip of paper into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, and for the first time all night, he doesn’t glance at the clock above the bar to make sure he’s sticking to his schedule.
