Moe Sorrentino, 62, has made a science of the Friday night VFW fish fry over the four years since his wife Elaine passed. He shows up at 6:17 sharp, right after the early bird crowd clears out but before the local high school football teams pile in for post-game meals. He grabs the same scuffed Formica table by the back door, orders cod extra crispy, a side of vinegar-drenched coleslaw, and a cold Iron City, and sits alone running through his to-do list for the weekend’s pinball repairs in his head. He’s a vintage pinball restorer, runs the small business out of his two-car garage, makes enough to keep the lights on and take a yearly fishing trip to Lake Erie with his old toll booth crew, and he likes the quiet. He’s got a stubborn streak a mile wide, still holds grudges against guys who cut him off in traffic in 2019, still hasn’t spoken to his cousin who borrowed his riding lawnmower in 2021 and never brought it back.
He’s halfway through his cod, wiping a dollop of tartar sauce off his work jeans, when the chair across from him scrapes against the linoleum. He looks up, and his jaw tightens. Carla Marquez, 58, Elaine’s former best friend, the woman he’s blamed for 18 years for ruining his son’s high school graduation weekend. She’s wearing a faded plaid flannel shirt and ripped jeans, her dark hair streaked with gray pulled back in a loose braid, and she smells like vanilla sandalwood, the same perfume she used to wear to all of Elaine’s summer cookouts, the scent he used to associate with annoyance and petty arguments over potato salad recipes. She leans in to set her own plate of catfish on the table, her elbow brushing the neck of his beer bottle and leaving a faint smudge of wet condensation on the label, and she holds eye contact with him for three full seconds before she sits, a small smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth.
He’s half ready to tell her to get lost, that this is his regular table, but half the guys from his garage bowling league are sitting two tables over, and he doesn’t want to make a scene. He just grunts, stabs a crinkle-cut fry with his fork, and avoids her gaze. She doesn’t take the hint. She says she moved back to the area three weeks prior, her second husband left her for a 32-year-old Pilates instructor in Tucson, and she’s running a mobile used book sale for senior centers across Allegheny County now. He nods, noncommittal, until she brings up the graduation weekend, the one he’d snuck off to Atlantic City for a high stakes poker tournament, the one he’d thought Carla told Elaine about after he lied and said he was stuck on a rare machine repair job in Cleveland.
She snorts, takes a long sip of her sweet iced tea, and tells him the truth. Elaine found the hotel receipt crumpled in the pocket of his grease-stained work coveralls when she was doing laundry. She didn’t want to admit she’d been going through his pockets, scared he was cheating instead of just gambling away half their vacation fund, so she made up the lie that Carla had seen him at the Atlantic City bus terminal. Carla went along with it, because Elaine was her best friend, and she’d been scared Moe would leave if Elaine confronted him with the receipt. Moe blinks, sets his fork down with a clink, and stares at her. 18 years of quiet anger, of avoiding her at holidays, of talking trash about her to anyone who would listen, and it was all based on a lie.
The jukebox switches over to a low Patsy Cline track, and the noise of the VFW fades a little around the edges. She reaches across the table to grab a fry off his plate, her calloused fingers (from hauling 40-pound boxes of books every day, she notes offhand) brushing his knuckles when she pulls back, and he feels a jolt run up his arm, warm and unexpected. He’s confused, at first, half disgusted that he’s even feeling anything for the woman he’s hated for nearly two decades, half curious, because he hasn’t had anyone look at him the way she’s looking at him now, soft and amused, since Elaine got sick. She teases him, says she always thought he was kind of cute back in the day, even when he was moping around the cookouts wearing that ratty Steelers hoodie with the hole in the elbow, pretending he was mad at the world. He laughs, a rough, rusty sound, he hasn’t laughed like that in months.
They stay until the VFW staff starts wiping down the counters and stacking the folding chairs, turning off the neon beer signs one by one. He walks her out to her beat up navy minivan, the rain coming down in a soft, cold drizzle that leaves his hair sticking to his forehead, and she stops by the driver’s side door, stepping close enough that her shoulder is pressed to his, her rain jacket cold against his flannel. She looks up at him, her eyes glinting in the yellow streetlight, and says she’s been thinking about him on and off for years, wondered if he’d ever stop being mad enough to listen to her. He doesn’t say anything, just reaches up, brushes a wet strand of hair off her face, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her cheek, and she leans into the touch, her hand coming up to rest lightly on his wrist.
She asks if he wants to come back to her new apartment. She’s got a 1978 Space Invaders pinball machine in her basement, she says, the same one he used to rave about back in the 90s, it’s been broken for three months, she’s been meaning to call someone to fix it but never got around to it. He nods, no hesitation, and tells her he’s got his full toolbox in the bed of his truck, plus extra solenoids he picked up at a parts swap last weekend. She grins, climbs into her minivan, and he walks back to his beat up Ford pickup, his boots squelching in the puddles in the potholed parking lot. He pulls out behind her, the rain tapping against his windshield, the Steelers post-game show playing low on the radio, and he rolls down the window a crack to let the cool air in, the smell of rain and wet asphalt mixing with the faint leftover scent of her vanilla sandalwood perfume on his shirt sleeve.
