Clay Bennett is 57, retired TVA lineman, 32 years climbing 80-foot poles in thunder and ice, left with a bad left knee and a scar snaking up his right wrist from a 2018 line fire that put him in the ER for three days. He’s stubborn to a fault, still holds a year-long grudge against the local library board for pulling his late father’s pulp westerns from the annual summer book sale, calling them “too violent for family audiences.” Widowed four years now, he spends most days fixing up a 1978 Ford F-150 in his garage and drinking PBR at The Rusty Spur every Friday, telling anyone who’ll listen the library is run by out-of-touch busybodies who don’t care about local history.
She was 48, Mara Hale, the new library director the board had hired six months prior, the one he’d heard was undoing a lot of the old board’s stupid rules. She was wearing a faded Johnny Cash tee that hung loose off one shoulder, high-waisted denim shorts, scuffed brown cowboy boots, a tattoo of an open book curled around her left wrist. Her dark hair was pulled back in a braid streaked with strands of silver, and she was laughing so hard at a kid who’d dropped a stack of Dr. Seuss books that her eyes crinkled shut. She looked up, caught him staring, and held eye contact for three full seconds, a tiny, knowing smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth, before she knelt to help the kid pick up the books.