Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living building custom fishing rods out of a cinder block garage tucked between pine stands outside Brainerd, Minnesota. His biggest flaw, he’ll admit if he’s three beers deep at the VFW, is he holds grudges longer than the northern pike he catches in local lakes hold onto minnows. He’s been widowed six years, spends most of his free time sanding graphite blanks or testing new lines at the public access, and only leaves his shop during fair week for the smoked whitefish stand run by a group of Ojibwe elders from the nearby reservation.
The August air hangs thick with pine resin and fried dough when he cuts through the craft vendor row, work boots dusted with sawdust, cold root beer sweating through the paper cup in his left hand. He’s halfway to the fish stand when a jar of wild raspberry jam catches his eye, the fruit deep crimson, labeled in scrawled handwriting. His late wife used to can the same stuff every summer, so he slows, leaning in to get a better look, and that’s when he hears his name.
He looks up, and his jaw tightens. Elara Voss. His high school girlfriend’s older sister, the woman he’s blamed for thirty years for ratting him out when they snuck into her family’s lake cabin senior year, getting him banned from the property and dumped two weeks before prom. He’d not seen her since she left for college in Chicago a month after that fight.
Her hair’s cut short now, streaked with silver at the temples, and she’s wearing a faded Garth Brooks tour tee, a flannel tied around her waist, nails chipped with berry stain. She leans over the edge of the wooden booth, grinning, and the scent of raspberry and vanilla candle wax drifts over to him, sharp and sweet. “I knew that was you. You still walk like you’re carrying a 10-pound walleye in each pocket.”
Manny almost turns and walks away. That old, sharp irritation pricks at the back of his throat, the same anger he felt when he showed up to the cabin to find the locks changed, his ex screaming that he was a selfish idiot for getting them caught. But he’s already stopped, already holding the jar of jam in his hand, so he huffs a dry laugh. “Elara. Thought you were still living in the big city, marrying lawyers.”
She snorts, wiping her hands on the ripped knees of her jeans. “Got divorced last year. Mom and Dad left me the cabin, so I moved back to sell jam and stop answering 2 a.m. emails about corporate mergers. You still building those fancy fishing rods I see advertised on the local Facebook groups?”
He nods, and she pushes a cracker slathered in jam across the booth toward him. Their fingers brush when he takes it, the skin of her wrist soft and slightly calloused at the knuckles, and he flinches like he’s been zapped by a live wire. He takes a bite, and the jam tastes exactly like the jars they used to steal from the cabin pantry that weekend, back before everything went sideways.
“You know,” she says, leaning against the booth, her voice lower now, like she’s sharing a secret only the crickets chirping in the nearby grass can hear, “I never ratted you out. That was your girlfriend. She caught us kissing behind the boathouse that Saturday, figured she’d punish both of us by telling my parents you broke in alone.”
Manny freezes, the half-eaten cracker still in his hand. He’d carried that grudge for three whole decades, told every friend who’d listen that Elara was the stuck-up goody two shoes who ruined his senior year, and none of it was true. That old irritation warms into something else, something tight and hot in his chest, equal parts embarrassment and the faint, forgotten buzz of attraction he’d felt that night behind the boathouse, when she’d tasted like cherry coke and the same raspberry jam he was eating now.
They talk for forty minutes, the fair crowd thinning around them, the ferris wheel lights blinking pink and gold above the pine trees, the distant sound of a cover band playing old Johnny Cash drifting over the grounds. She tells him she’s been fixing up the cabin, the old boathouse still has the holes they kicked in the wall when they were hiding from her dad that weekend, the lake still has more walleye than you can catch in a week. When he hands her a twenty for two jars of jam, his knuckles brush her wrist again, and this time she doesn’t pull away, holding eye contact for three beats longer than she needs to, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a smile he remembers from that night.
“You should come out next Saturday,” she says, pulling a pen from behind her ear. “The walleye are biting at dawn. I’ll make pancakes, you can bring one of those fancy rods you build, test it out off the dock.” She scribbles her cell number on the back of a jam label, leans across the booth, and slips it into the breast pocket of his canvas work shirt, her fingers brushing the thin cotton over his chest for half a second too long.
Manny tucks the jam jars into his work bag, nods, and tells her he’ll be there at 5:30, bring extra dark roast coffee, the kind she used to steal from her parents’ canister back when they were kids. She laughs, and the sound mixes with the calliope music from the merry-go-round a few rows over, soft and bright.
He turns and walks toward his truck, the smoked whitefish he’d come for completely forgotten, the crumpled jam label pressing warm against his chest through his shirt, the taste of wild raspberry still lingering on his tongue. He unlocks the truck door, tosses the bag onto the passenger seat, and pulls out his phone to save her number before he forgets the digits.
