Silas Marlow, 52, has built custom fishing rods for Tampa Bay anglers for 17 years out of a cinder block shop off Gandy Boulevard, the walls lined with blanks coated in iridescent epoxy and photos of clients holding tarpon so big they look fake. His biggest flaw, as his only part-time employee likes to tease him, is that he holds grudges longer than he holds onto a big catch on a light line. For 12 years, that grudge has been fixed squarely on Lena Hale, his ex-wife’s former maid of honor, the woman he’d blamed for spilling the tea on his bachelor party deep sea fishing trip where he’d gotten drunk and passed out in the wheelhouse, the story his ex had used to file for divorce three months later.
He’d avoided every local event he thought she’d be at for a decade, skipped the annual seafood festival, the neighborhood Fourth of July cookout, even the pub down the street where she tended bar on weekends for two years after the split. The only reason he’s at the fire department’s annual crawfish boil on a sweltering Saturday in May is because he donated a $900 custom inshore rod for the raffle, and the fire chief is a regular client who’d asked him to stay for at least an hour, or risk getting a ticket every time he parked his work truck on the side of the road by the boat ramp.
The humidity clings to his t-shirt like a second skin, the air thick with the smell of cayenne, boiled corn, and diesel from the food truck parked by the fire station bay. A siren wails briefly as the crew tests the engine, and kids shriek as they chase each other around the parking lot with squirt guns, the cold spray misting his ankles every few minutes. He’s halfway to the raffle table with the rod in its soft cloth sleeve when someone carrying a stack of paper plates rounds the corner of the canvas tent, and they nearly collide. Her elbow brushes the hair on his forearm, warm and solid, and he freezes when he looks down. It’s Lena.
She’s not the sharp-edged, dark bobbed 36 year old he remembered. Her auburn hair is streaked with faint silver, tied back with a faded red bandana dotted with sunflower prints, freckles dusted across her nose that he never noticed before, and she’s wearing cutoff jean shorts and work boots caked in dark mud from the native plant nursery she’s run for the last eight years. She smirks, like she knew exactly he’d be here sooner or later, and holds out a hand, the calluses on her palm rough from hauling potted palms and mixing potting soil when they touch.
“Thought I’d run into you eventually,” she says, and her voice is lower than he remembers, rougher from years of yelling over nursery fans and off-key karaoke nights at the pub down the street. He can smell coconut sunscreen and the faint, sweet tang of boiled crawfish spice on her shirt, and for a second he forgets how to be mad, his mouth going dry before he mumbles a stiff greeting.
He’s already mentally mapping an exit route to drop the rod off and bolt, but she nods at the splintered, beer-sticky picnic table off to the side of the crowd, and before he knows it he’s sitting across from her, a plastic cup of cold IPA in his hand, a heaping tray of spicy crawfish piled between them. She teases him first, about the scraggly gray goatee he’s grown since she last saw him, about the fact that he still wears the same beat up Florida Gators baseball cap he’s had since his senior year of college, the brim frayed at the edge where he chews it when he’s focused on wrapping rod guides.
Then she drops the bomb he never saw coming. “Your ex already had her bags packed before that bachelor party, by the way,” she says, popping the tail off a crawfish and popping the meat in her mouth, like she’s talking about the weather instead of the lie that derailed 12 years of his social life. “She was cheating on you with that luxury realtor she married six months after you split. She told me to tell you I ratted you out so she wouldn’t have to admit she was the one being unfaithful. I tried to tell you, you know. You blocked my number, crossed the street when you saw me at the Publix parking lot, bailed on the group fishing trip three years in a row when you heard I was coming. Figured you’d rather be mad than hurt.”
Silas sits back, the crawfish he was holding slipping out of his fingers onto the tray, the spice from the shell sticking to his fingertips. 12 years of anger, of avoiding half the people he used to be friends with, of skipping trips to his favorite sandbar because Lena would be there, all of it feels like it dissolves in the thick, salty air. He feels stupid, first, then a little giddy, like the 20 pound weight he’s been carrying around on his shoulders just got cut loose.
They talk for an hour, then two, the crowd around them thinning out as the sun dips low over the bay, painting the sky streaky pink and tangerine. She leans in when he talks about the new UV-resistant epoxy blend he’s testing for rod blanks, her knee brushing his under the table every time she shifts to reach for another crawfish, and he notices the tiny, thin scar on her left wrist from when she fell off his 17 foot Boston Whaler on a trip to the Anclote Key sandbar back in 2008, when all four of them were still friends. She steals a crawfish from his tray, her fingers brushing his when she grabs it, and he feels a jolt go up his arm that he hasn’t felt since he was 16 on his first date with a girl from his homeroom.
The raffle gets called right as he’s about to ask her if she wants to get a late dinner at the taco shack down the road. They call her name for the top prize, the custom rod he built, the one wrapped in teal thread to match the color of the bay on a clear day. She laughs so hard she snorts, and stands up to go get it, waving at him from the front of the crowd when the fire chief hands it to her, the crowd hooting and clapping.
When she comes back, she slings the rod over her shoulder, and smirks at him, wiping a fleck of cayenne off the corner of her mouth. “Guess that means you have to teach me how to use this thing, right? I’ve got a little hidden spot off the Alafia River I’ve been dying to fish, never could catch anything worth keeping with the cheap plastic rods I buy at the big box home improvement store.”
He agrees before she finishes talking, they swap numbers, and he walks her to her beat up 2012 Ford F150, the bed filled with potted ferns and a neon bumper sticker that says I BRAKE FOR ALLIGATORS stuck to the dented tailgate. She leans in for a quick hug before she climbs in, her chest pressing against his for half a second, that coconut sunscreen smell wrapping around him again, warm and sweet. “I’ll bring the cold IPA,” she says, turning the key in the ignition, the truck rumbling to life. “You bring the live shrimp. 7 a.m. Saturday, don’t be late, or I’m stealing your best rod next.”
He watches her taillights fade down the road before he touches the spot on his forearm where her elbow first brushed him, already counting the days until Saturday.
