Ron Eckhart is 63, retired telephone line technician, 12 years out from losing his wife to ovarian cancer, and he hasn’t deviated from his weekly VFW fish fry routine in a decade. He shows up at 6:17 sharp, takes the last stool at the far end of the bar, orders one cod platter extra crispy, a draft Coors, and spends the next hour and a half picking at his food and ignoring the small-town chatter that bounces off the wood-paneled walls. The room smells like fried batter, lemon Pledge, and the faint, stale tang of old beer soaked into the floorboards, and the jukebox is stuck on a loop of 1970s Johnny Cash cuts, which Ron doesn’t mind one bit.
The October rain is lashing the windows when the door swings open, and a woman he’s never seen before shakes water off a faded wool coat, her dark hair pulled back in a loose braid. The bar is packed, every other stool taken, and she scans the room once before walking straight to his end, boots squelching on the sticky linoleum. “Mind if I sit?” she asks, nodding at the empty stool next to him, and Ron grunts a yes before he can think to tell her he prefers to sit alone. Her name is Mara, she says, 58, just moved to town last week to take over the tiny public library after her ex-husband left her for a 28-year-old paralegal at his law firm. She orders a cod platter too, extra tartar sauce, and Ron finds himself talking before he can stop himself, making a dumb joke about how the VFW’s tartar sauce is so thick you could spackle a wall with it, and she laughs so hard she snorts a little, and he feels a sharp, unfamiliar jolt low in his chest.
She knocks over a ramekin of the stuff ten minutes later, and they both reach for it at the same time, their hands brushing hard enough that Ron can feel the thick callus on her index finger, the kind you get from turning thousands of book pages over decades. The tartar sauce drips onto his faded flannel sleeve, and she dabs at it with a napkin, her hand warm through the thin fabric, and neither of them moves when their knees bump under the bar, pressed tight together because the stools are crammed so close. He tells her he restores vintage rotary phones in his workshop out at his place off the old logging road, and her eyes light up, says she found a box of 12 beat-up 1970s rotaries in the library basement earlier that week, was going to haul them to the dump next weekend. Ron’s first instinct is to bristle, to tell her those are worth saving, that she doesn’t know what she’s throwing away, but instead he finds himself leaning in, close enough that he can smell the lavender laundry detergent on her shirt, the faint hint of pine shampoo in her hair.
The whole room is staring, he can feel it, the regulars who’ve known him for 30 years all sneaking glances, whispering to each other, and part of him hates it, hates that he’s breaking the unspoken rule everyone has about him, that he’s the quiet widower who keeps to himself, no drama, no surprises. He’s disgusted at himself for even entertaining the idea of talking to a woman this long, for feeling the kind of flutter in his stomach he hasn’t felt since he was 19 and took his wife to their first high school dance. But the other part of him doesn’t care, likes the way she doesn’t tiptoe around his wife when he mentions her, just says “I’m sorry, that sucks” like she means it, no pity, no awkward pauses, no attempts to fix something that can’t be fixed. She asks him if he wants to come look at the phones tomorrow, says the library is closed for inventory, no one else will be there, they can take as long as they want sorting through them, maybe she’ll even make him coffee.
He hesitates for a full 10 seconds, his first thought to say no, to go home to his empty house, his quiet workshop, his routine that never changes, no risk of getting hurt again, no risk of the town gossips running their mouths. But he looks at her, and there’s a smudge of fried batter on her left cheek, her dark eyes are bright, and she’s leaning in just a little, close enough that he can feel the heat off her arm where it’s pressed to his on the bar. He says yes. She pulls a crumpled napkin out of her purse, pushes it across the bar to him, and he writes his number down, his hand a little shaky, and when she takes it from him her fingers brush his, soft and warm, and she tucks the napkin into the pocket of her jeans like it’s something important.
They finish their food, and he walks her out to her beat-up Subaru in the rain, holding an old canvas umbrella over her so she doesn’t get soaked, and she pauses before she climbs in, reaching up to brush a strand of wet hair off his forehead, her thumb brushing his cheek for half a second. “10 a.m. sharp,” she says, and he nods, watching her pull out of the parking lot, rain streaming down the windshield of his truck. He drives home, the Johnny Cash song he heard earlier playing on the radio, and when he walks into his workshop, he runs a finger over the polished rotary phone he finished restoring last week, the one he was going to put up for sale online. He picks up the tiny flathead screwdriver he keeps in his pocket, sets it on the workbench next to the phone, and grins when he sees a smudge of tartar sauce still on the cuff of his flannel.
