Moe Sorrentino, 62, spent 34 years prying abalone off Monterey Bay reefs before a run-in with a great white tore a chunk out of his left calf and forced him into early retirement. His biggest flaw? He holds grudges like he holds his old dive knives: sharp, close, and ready to cut anyone who crosses the line he’s drawn. For 18 years, that line included Clara Marlow, his late best friend Jake’s ex-wife, who he’d written off as a gold-digging opportunist who left Jake when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He’d turned down every invitation to events he knew she’d attend, talked trash about her at the local bait shop, even refused to sell her any of the smoked salmon he cured in his backyard smokehouse when she’d asked two years prior.
The annual Pacific Grove fire department chili cookoff was the last place he expected to run into her, but there she was, standing three feet from his booth in high-waisted jeans and a faded sea glass shop hoodie, holding a paper bowl of three-alarm chili that was already staining the edge red. A streak of silver ran through her dark, wavy hair, catching the late afternoon sun, and when she laughed at a kid who’d just spilled a cup of lemonade all over his dad’s boots, the corners of her eyes crinkled the same way they had back when he and Jake used to host backyard barbecues before the cancer, before the divorce, before all the bad blood.
His jaw tightened. He was about to duck behind the table stacked with jars of his smoked salmon dip when the mayor, a guy he’d gone to high school with, clapped Clara on the back and said something about how grateful the town was that she’d covered the last three months of Jake’s hospice bills out of her own pocket, even after Jake had lied about cheating to make the divorce easier on everyone. Moe froze. He’d never heard that. All Jake ever told him was that Clara left him because she didn’t want to deal with a sick husband, that she’d taken half his savings and run to San Francisco.
Clara turned then, and caught him staring. She hesitated for half a second, then walked over, her boots crunching on the crushed gravel under the booth. He could smell the chili on her clothes, mixed with jasmine perfume and salt from the ocean a block away. “Figured you’d be here,” she said, nodding at the jars of dip. “I’ve heard it’s good. Even if you refused to sell me any when I asked.”
He didn’t know what to say. He was still reeling from the mayor’s comment, the anger he’d carried for 18 years feeling suddenly stupid, heavy, like the lead weight belt he used to wear on dives. “I didn’t know,” he said, the words coming out rougher than he intended. “About the hospice bills. About Jake lying.”
Clara nodded, her expression softening. She reached across the table for a sample cracker slathered in dip, and her knuckles brushed his when she grabbed it. His calloused, scarred skin caught on the soft, smooth skin of her hand, and neither of them pulled away for a beat longer than necessary. “I didn’t expect you to,” she said. “Jake was your best friend. You were always gonna take his side. I get it. I kept his dive logs, by the way. The ones he made of the uncharted reefs off Point Lobos. I know you’ve been asking for them since we were 25. I was waiting till you were ready to listen.”
His throat went dry. Those logs were Jake’s life’s work, hand-drawn maps of reefs no other diver had ever documented, notes on abalone populations, migration patterns of great whites, hidden caves filled with sea glass. He’d thought they’d been thrown out when Jake sold the house after the divorce. “You kept them?”
“Of course I did,” she said. “They’re at my shop. If you want to come get them, after the cookoff wraps up.”
He didn’t hesitate, even though a small part of him was screaming that this was wrong, that he was supposed to hate her, that the whole town would talk if they saw him walking into her shop after dark. The rain started to fall just as the cookoff closed down, light, misty stuff that stuck to his hair and his old dive jacket. Her shop smelled like salt and lavender candles when he walked in, shelves lined with pieces of sea glass in every shade of blue and green, soft jazz playing low on a record player in the corner. She pulled the logs out of a cedar chest under the counter, the leather covers worn soft at the edges, and handed them to him.
He flipped through the pages, his fingers brushing the faded ink of Jake’s handwriting, and saw little notes in Clara’s handwriting scrawled in the margins: Remind Moe to bring extra oxygen tanks next dive, Don’t forget Moe’s favorite root beer for the barbecue, Call Moe if the cough gets worse. He felt stupid, guilty, for all the years he’d spent hating her, for all the things he’d said. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice thick. “I was an idiot. I should’ve asked you your side of things.”
She sat down next to him on the wooden bench by the window, their thighs pressed together through their jeans, and put her hand on his arm. Her palm was warm through the worn fabric of his jacket. “I know,” she said. She was close enough that he could feel her breath on his cheek, see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes. When she tilted her head up and kissed him, slow and soft, he didn’t pull away. He hadn’t kissed anyone since his wife died seven years prior, and it felt like coming up for air after a long, deep dive, like all the tension he’d been carrying for years was melting away.
He stayed for dinner, she made clam chowder with clams she’d dug up that morning, and they talked until 10 o’clock, about Jake, about diving, about the sea glass she found on the beach every morning. When he left, he held the dive logs against his chest, and looked back at her porch, where she was standing in the doorway waving, the light from inside wrapping around her like a blanket. He turned the key in the ignition, the radio crackled to life with an old Merle Haggard track, and he grinned so wide his scar pulled tight at the corner of his mouth.
