Manny Rocha is 62, spent 27 years tending the Race Point Lighthouse before he retired three years back, and his biggest flaw is that he’s clung so hard to the quiet routine he built after his wife Linda died that he’s turned down every invitation to do anything that doesn’t involve sanding reclaimed ship wood or walking his hound dog along the beach at dawn. He’s at The Rusty Buoy on a Thursday, same as he is every Thursday, for the weekly bluegrass jam, sweating through the cuffs of his gray flannel because the place is packed with summer tourists and the screen door’s stuck open, letting in thick salt air that sticks to his skin. His beer is half warm, the band is tuning up a fiddle that whines high enough to make his teeth ache, and he’s just about to flag down the bartender for a refill when someone bumps the stool next to him hard enough to slosh rosé across his left sleeve.
He looks up ready to snap, and it’s Elara Voss, the 58-year-old librarian who moved to town six months prior, the woman every single one of his neighbors has tried to set him up with so many times he’s started crossing the street when he sees her coming. She’s flustered, cheeks pink, yanking a crumpled paper napkin out of her jeans pocket before he can say a word, leaning across the gap between their stools to dab at the wet spot on his arm. Her knuckles brush the scar he got when he slipped on ice repairing the lighthouse lens back in 2011, and he freezes. She smells like lavender lotion and the orange slice bobbing in her drink, and when her eyes meet his she doesn’t look away, doesn’t fumble through an awkward excuse about the crowded bar, just huffs a laugh that’s equal parts embarrassed and annoyed.
.jpg)
“For the record,” she says, sitting back on her stool but not shifting further away, her knee brushing his under the bar now, “I already told Mrs. Henderson to stop badgering both of us about coffee dates. I didn’t move to the middle of Cape Cod to have a bunch of retired school principals play matchmaker for me.” Manny blinks, takes a sip of his warm beer, and realizes he’s spent six months assuming she was in on the whole set-up scheme, that she wanted the same thing the gossips did: a quiet widower with a paid-off house to settle down with. He didn’t expect her to be as annoyed by the whole thing as he is.
They talk through the first two sets, the band’s banjo picking fading into background noise as he tells her about restoring old nautical wood pieces for the tourist shops downtown, and she tells him about the box of 1920s lighthouse log books the library inherited that are falling apart at the spines, no one in town knows how to repair them without ruining the pages. He’s halfway through telling her about the time he found a 1930s log book washed up on the beach after a nor’easter when the show ends, the crowd filters out onto the sidewalk, and he realizes it’s pouring fog so thick you can’t see the streetlight at the end of the block.
She mentions she lives three blocks over, and he offers to walk her, even though he’d told himself three hours prior he’d be home by 10 to let his dog out. The sidewalk is slick with dew, she’s wearing scuffed white sneakers that have no traction, and she slips on a cobblestone half a block from his house, reaching out to grab his arm to steady herself. He wraps his arm around her waist on instinct, pulling her close enough that he can feel her heartbeat through her wool cardigan, and for a second he’s frozen, that familiar twist of guilt in his gut screaming that he’s betraying Linda, that he has no right to want to be this close to anyone else.
Then she says, quiet enough that only he can hear it over the distant fog horn, “Linda was my cousin, you know. She told me once if she ever went first, she’d come back and haunt you if you spent the rest of your life sitting alone in that lighthouse talking to no one but seagulls.” The knot in his chest loosens all at once, so fast his eyes burn a little. He doesn’t overthink it, leans down and kisses her, slow, no rush, tastes like rosé and the spearmint gum she’s been chewing all night, and she kisses him back, her hand curling around the back of his neck like she’s been waiting to do it for months.
He brings her back to his place instead of walking her the rest of the way to her apartment, lets the dog out in the backyard while he makes chamomile tea on the stove, and they sit on his front porch swing overlooking the ocean. He pulls out the first log book he ever kept when he started at the lighthouse, turns to the page he marked with a pressed daisy, the entry he wrote the day he met Linda at the town clam bake. Elara traces the faded blue ink with her index finger, doesn’t say anything, just leans her head on his shoulder, her hair soft against his jaw.
The fog horn blows off shore every ten seconds, slow and steady, the sound he’s fallen asleep to almost every night of his adult life. He wraps his arm around her shoulders, tucks the edge of her wool cardigan closed against the cool breeze, and doesn’t let go when she shifts closer to press her side fully against his.
