Javi Ruiz is 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, his hands crisscrossed with thin white scars from table saw slips and splinter mishaps, his left wrist still bearing the faded stick-and-poke of a pine tree a student gave him during his last year on the job. He’s been a widower eight years, and his most consistent personality flaw is that he assumes anyone who’s nice to him is only doing it out of pity for his dead wife. He’d avoided the annual Maple Street Summer Fair every year since Elena died, too, because she’d run the pie contest for 12 straight years, and he couldn’t stand the way people would corner him to say they missed her cooking. He only showed up this year because his former star student, now the parks and rec director, begged him to judge the youth birdhouse contest, and he couldn’t say no to the kid who’d once built him a fully functional wooden scale model of his 1987 Ford F-150 as a retirement gift.
He’d planned to slip out the second the last birdhouse was scored, but the scent of peach pie hit him halfway to the parking lot, thick and sweet and exactly like the ones Elena used to bake every Sunday, and his feet turned toward the contest tent before he could talk himself out of it. He hovered at the edge of the canvas flap for three full minutes, hands stuffed in the pockets of his worn work jeans, before the woman behind the folding table looked up from wiping flour off her forearms and caught him staring. She was 58, if he had to guess, auburn hair streaked with silver pulled back in a messy braid, a smudge of cinnamon on her left cheek, and she held eye contact for two full beats longer than polite, no forced sympathetic smile, just a half smirk like she knew exactly how long he’d been loitering.
He knocked over a stack of paper plates when he stepped forward to apologize, and they both reached down to grab them at the same time. His calloused, scarred knuckles brushed her soft, flour-dusted ones, and he jolted back like he’d touched a hot soldering iron, face heating up so fast he could feel the tips of his ears burn. She laughed, warm and low, not mocking, and stacked the plates neatly on the table. “Most people just ask for a sample instead of staging a distraction,” she said, nodding at the tray of peach pie slices sitting under a plastic dome. She introduced herself as Maeve, the town’s new librarian, who’d moved to town two years prior and volunteered to run the pie contest when no one else would step up to fill Elena’s spot.
Javi tensed up immediately, ready for the usual “oh you’re Elena’s husband, I’ve heard so much about you, she was such a sweet woman” speech, but it never came. Instead, she pulled a tattered, stain-covered spiral notebook out from under the table, and he recognized it immediately: it was Elena’s, the one she’d scribbled all her pie recipes in, notes scribbled in the margins about who liked extra cinnamon, who was allergic to nutmeg, who would sneak extra crust when she wasn’t looking. “Found it in a box of old rec department supplies last year,” Maeve said, flipping to the page marked with a daisy sticky note. “Used her peach pie recipe for this year’s batch. Tinkered with it a little, added a splash of bourbon to the filling. Figured she wouldn’t mind.”
Javi’s chest felt tight, half guilt half something else he hadn’t felt in so long he couldn’t name it, something warm and thrumming low in his gut. He’d spent eight years convincing himself that even looking at another woman was a betrayal, that he was supposed to spend the rest of his life alone in the house he’d shared with Elena, eating frozen dinners and sanding birdhouses for the local wildlife rescue. He wanted to leave, to run back to his truck and lock the doors and pretend he’d never smelled that pie, but when Maeve held out a paper plate with a slice of pie on it, he took it.
The first bite tasted like home, like Sunday afternoons and Elena laughing while he burned the burgers on the grill, like the way she’d leave flour handprints on his jeans when she hugged him mid-bake. He didn’t realize he was crying until Maeve slid a paper napkin across the table, her hand brushing his for the second time, lighter this time, intentional. He didn’t pull away. They sat on the folding chairs behind the tent for 40 minutes, talking, Maeve leaning in when he told stories about his students gluing googly eyes to table saws, her knee brushing his under the table every time she laughed, not pulling away when his knee stayed pressed to hers. She told him she’d found a beat-up 1972 Fender acoustic at a library book sale a month prior, and she’d been trying to fix the cracked soundboard, but she didn’t know the first thing about wood repair.
The fair’s closing announcement blared over the loudspeakers, golden hour light painting the tops of the oak trees pink, and Javi knew he should leave, that this was crossing a line he’d drawn for himself eight years prior. But then Maeve tilted her head, that same half smirk on her face, and said she had a whole extra peach pie in the cooler in her truck, and if he wanted to come back to her place to share it, he could take a look at the guitar while they were at it. He hesitated for three seconds, thought about the empty house waiting for him, the stack of unopened mail on his kitchen counter, the way Maeve’s eyes crinkled at the corners when she laughed, the way she hadn’t once mentioned pity or sorry for your loss the entire time they’d talked. He said yes.
They walked toward the parking lot together, the air still smelling like fried funnel cake and cut grass, Maeve’s shoulder brushing his every few steps, no awkward space between them. She pulled her truck keys out of her pocket, unlocked the passenger side door, and held it open for him, her hand resting light on his elbow as he climbed in. Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” was playing on the radio when she turned the key, and she hummed along as she pulled out of the parking lot, her hand resting on the center console, half an inch from his.
