Moe Sorrentino, 62, retired Puget Sound ferry dispatcher, only showed up to the local fire department’s summer beer garden because his next-door neighbor Linda begged him. Three years out from his wife Elaine’s death, he’d made a habit of turning down every community invite, hated the pitying smiles people tossed his way, hated feeling like a charity case. Linda had bribed him with free oak-smoked brisket, though, and he was too much of a sucker for good BBQ to say no.
He was leaning against a wooden post by the beer tent, half-empty IPA in one hand, a paper plate stacked with brisket in the other, when she bumped into him. The force sloshed cold beer over his cup’s rim, soaking a three-inch splotch on his faded navy dispatcher jacket, the one with frayed cuffs and a peeling Tacoma Narrows Bridge sticker on the chest. A dollop of tangy BBQ sauce plopped warm and sticky on the back of his left wrist, right over the faint scar he’d gotten catching his hand in a ferry gate latch back in 2017.
She yelped, setting her tray of pulled pork sliders down on a nearby picnic table fast enough that one slid half off the edge. Her name was Lila, Linda’s niece, and the last time he’d seen her she was 12, covered in cherry popsicle stains, trying to sneak his fishing rod off the porch to catch minnows in the sound. She was 48 now, ran a mobile dog grooming business out of Portland, had moved up two weeks prior to help Linda recover from knee replacement surgery. She smelled like coconut shampoo and charcoal smoke, freckles splayed across her nose and down to the top of her sunflower-patterned sundress, and she leaned in so close her shoulder brushed his bicep as she grabbed a handful of napkins from the table dispenser.
He flinched when her fingers wrapped around his wrist to dab at the sauce, unused to anyone touching him that wasn’t his doctor or the grocery store cashier. He pulled back half an inch, jaw tight, equal parts flustered and annoyed at himself for noticing how her hair caught the golden hour light, how her hazel eyes crinkled at the corners when she apologized. “You’re fine,” he mumbled, wiping at the sauce himself with his other hand, smearing it worse. She laughed, a bright loud sound that cut through crowd chatter and the distant wail of a ferry horn out on the sound, and grabbed his wrist again, gentler this time, until the sauce was gone.
He told himself he should leave after that, go home, watch the Mariners game on his couch alone like he did every Saturday. But she asked about his jacket, his old job, and before he knew it they’d been standing there for 40 minutes, close enough that their arms brushed every time someone squeezed past to get to the food tent. She laughed at every dumb old ferry story he told, even the one about the guy who tried to bring a live goat on board as an “emotional support livestock animal,” laughed so hard she snort-laughed, and didn’t even apologize for it. He kept shaking off the weird twisting feeling in his chest, the part of him that felt like a creep for even talking to her this long, like he was breaking some unspoken rule about not hitting on your neighbor’s niece.
When the fire department announced the 50/50 raffle, they both realized they’d bought tickets from the same firefighter ten minutes apart, their numbers sequential, written in the same smudged blue marker. They held their tickets up next to each other to compare, their hands brushing when she leaned in to see his better, and neither pulled away for three full seconds. He won second prize: a two-day guided fishing trip out of Olympia, all gear included, for two people. She raised an eyebrow, grinning, and nudged his shoulder with hers. “I don’t know anyone else who likes fishing, and you only won ‘cause my ticket was the lucky one right before yours. You owe me a spot.”
He hesitated for half a second, the voice in his head screaming this was a bad idea, that he was too old, too rusty at this, that Linda would never look at him the same way again. Then he looked at her, cheeks pink from beer and sun, and nodded. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
They stayed for another hour, sharing a Styrofoam container of warm peach cobbler, her stealing bites off his fork when he was distracted watching a group of kids race around the field with sparklers. When he walked her to her beat-up white pickup parked down the street, she leaned up and kissed his cheek, lips warm and sticky from cobbler, and slipped a crumpled slip of paper with her phone number into his jacket pocket. “Text me this week to plan,” she said, climbing into the driver’s seat, and winked before she closed the door.
He walked home slow, cool evening air nipping at his cheeks, the sound of the party fading behind him. He touched the spot on his cheek where she’d kissed him, and for the first time in three years, he didn’t feel guilty for feeling happy. He kicked a dandelion head off its stem on the sidewalk, watched the fluff drift toward the ferry terminal glowing gold on the horizon, and curled his fingers around the crumpled paper in his pocket so tight his knuckles went white.
