Rudy Galvan, 62, custom fishing rod builder, has avoided the downtown Holland food truck rally every month since his wife Linda passed four years prior. He hates the pitying looks from old neighbors, the awkward small talk about how he’s holding up, the way half the town seems to think he’s one wrong move away from falling apart. His buddy Mike practically had to shove him out the door that crisp September evening, swearing the new tamale truck’s al pastor was so good it’d make him forget what grief tasted like. Rudy grumbled the whole walk over, work boots crunching over crushed gravel, the faint tang of Lake Michigan salt mixing with the smell of grilled meat and fried dough drifting down the street.
He spots the truck first, bright red with hand-painted yellow lettering, a line of eight people snaking out from the counter. He’s halfway to bailing when the woman leaning over the counter handing a kid a paper plate tucks a strand of wind-tousled dark hair behind her ear, and Rudy freezes. It’s Marisol Reyes. He hasn’t seen her since 1980, when she moved to Texas with her then-boyfriend, his former best friend Javi. He’d had a crush on her so fierce senior year he’d carved her initials into the handle of his first ever custom rod, hid it in the back of his closet so Linda never found it. The old flutter hits him square in the chest before he can stop it, and he feels a sharp twist of guilt, like he’s doing something wrong just by looking at her.
The line moves fast, and suddenly he’s standing right at the counter, so close he can smell jasmine perfume mixing with the smoky cumin from the grill behind her. She blinks, then grins, the same gap between her two front teeth he’d stared at through half his study hall classes. “Rudy Galvan. I’d know that scar on your left knuckle anywhere. Javi said you still lived around here.” Her voice is a little deeper than he remembers, roughened by years of Texas heat and cigarette smoke, he guesses. He stumbles over his order, asking for two tamales and a Modelo, and when she leans across to hand him the paper plate, her forearm brushes his, warm through the thin cotton of his work flannel. Their fingers brush when she passes him an extra side of salsa, and he swears his ears go red.
He grabs his food and heads for the most isolated picnic table he can find, fully intending to eat fast and hightail it back to his garage before he does something stupid. He’s halfway through his first tamale, spicy pork oozing out the end, when a shadow falls across the table. Marisol is holding a jar of pickled red onions, wearing beat-up white sneakers and a denim jacket that’s too big for her, and she nods at the bench across from him. “Mind if I sit? My shift ended five minutes ago, my cousin’s handling the rest of the rush.” He doesn’t say no, even as the voice in his head is screaming that this is a bad idea, that he’s betraying Linda, that he’s too old for this kind of nonsense.
She sits, and she’s close enough that he can see the little laugh lines fanning out from her eyes, the faint smudge of chili powder on her left cheek. She tells him she moved back three months prior to care for her mom, who’s recovering from a stroke, that she got divorced five years ago, that Javi sends his regards. She asks about his rod building, leans forward when he tells her he just finished a custom set for a charter captain out of Muskegon, her elbows on the table, her knee brushing his under the table by accident once, then again, like she’s doing it on purpose. The guilt fades slow, replaced by something lighter, something he hasn’t felt in years, like he’s 17 again and skipping football practice to sit in the parking lot with her, sharing a bag of chips. He tells her about Linda, about the fishing derby they ran every year for the local kids, and she nods, says Javi told her about Linda’s passing, that he was sorry. “Linda was good people,” she says, soft, and Rudy’s throat tightens a little.
He’s almost forgotten how long they’ve been sitting there when she says she’s been wanting to learn to fish since she moved back, that the lakes in Texas were all muddy and full of catfish, nothing like the clear Michigan water she grew up with. “I don’t know the first thing about rods or lures or any of that,” she says, and she reaches across the table, her hand covering his, her thumb brushing over that same old scar on his knuckle. “I was gonna ask if you’d be willing to show me sometime.” He almost says no, almost makes up an excuse about being swamped with orders, about having to prep for the derby, but then he remembers Linda laughing at him three months before she died, holding up that old rod with Marisol’s initials carved in the handle that she’d found when she was cleaning out the closet. “If that girl ever comes back to town,” she’d said, grinning, “you buy her a taco and stop being a coward.”
He says yes. They make plans to meet at the public boat launch next Saturday at 7 a.m., bring coffee, take his old aluminum boat out for a few hours. She stands up to go help her cousin pack up the truck, and she pauses for half a second, like she’s thinking about leaning in to hug him, then decides against it, waving over her shoulder as she walks away.
Rudy sits there for another 10 minutes, finishing his second tamale, watching the sun dip below the lake, painting the sky in streaks of tangerine and pink. The air is cool enough that he can see his breath when he exhales, and for the first time in four years, that chill doesn’t feel like a reminder of how empty his house is. He takes a slow sip of his now-warm beer, and smiles when she glances over her shoulder at him halfway across the parking lot, and winks.
