Tito Morales, 57, has made a quiet living restoring vintage fishing reels out of his clapboard workshop on the Oregon coast for 18 years. He’s got a scar across his left knuckle from a 1998 salmon run accident, a half-empty pack of Camels in his flannel shirt pocket, and a strict policy of staying out of small town gossip. Twelve years prior, when his wife left him for a Portland real estate developer who drove a Tesla and wore tailored boat shoes, he’d gotten sick of every grocery store clerk and bait shop regular asking him if he was “holding up okay”, so he’d retreated into his work, only leaving his property for supply runs and the annual three-day summer coastal craft fair.
This year, the booth next to his was run by Elara Voss, the 54-year-old who’d left the local parish pastor six months prior. The entire town had been whispering about her ever since, calling her cold, ungrateful, a homewrecker even though everyone with half a brain knew the pastor had been cheating on her with the church secretary for three years. Tito had avoided making eye contact with her all weekend, keeping his head down polishing brass reel components, even when he smelled her lavender hand cream drift over the two-foot gap between their booths, even when he heard her laugh at a kid’s bad joke about mermaids, low and warm, nothing like the shrill, performative cackle of the town’s church lady clique.
It was 45 minutes before the fair closed on Sunday when the gust hit, sharp off the Pacific, sending a stack of her poetry books tumbling off her folding table and sliding under Tito’s booth. He didn’t think before he knelt down, the rough canvas of his work pants scraping against the gravel parking lot, reaching for the closest copy of Mary Oliver’s *Devotions*. She knelt down on the other side at the same time, their foreheads knocking soft enough that it didn’t hurt, just stunned him for half a second. Their hands brushed when they both reached for the same book, her knuckle grazing his, calloused from tending to the community garden she ran out of the library basement, and he felt a tingle run up his arm that he hadn’t felt since he was 20 years old, sneaking his high school girlfriend into his parents’ fishing boat after dark.
“Sorry about that,” she said, sitting back on her heels, and he finally looked her in the eye, noticed flecks of gold in her hazel irises, a faint scar snaking across her right wrist from a childhood bike crash she’d mentioned once in a passing conversation at the hardware store two months prior. Her hair was streaked with silver, pulled back in a messy braid dotted with pine needles she’d picked up on her walk to the fair that morning. “Wind’s got a mind of its own this time of year.”
“Nah, my fault for leaving the gap between the booths too wide,” he said, gathering up the rest of the books and handing them to her. His fingers brushed hers again when he passed the stack over, and he didn’t pull away fast this time. He smelled fried Oreos and salt and her lavender cream, heard the distant twang of a country cover band on the main stage, felt the warm late August sun on the back of his neck.
He noticed the beat up 1971 Abu Garcia Ambassadeur sticking out of her canvas tote half a minute later, the casing dented, the handle stuck. “That reel your dad’s?” he asked, nodding at it. She’d mentioned once at the bait shop that her dad had given it to her for her 16th birthday, that it had seized up last winter and she couldn’t find anyone who knew how to fix it without charging her more than the reel was worth.
She blinked, surprised he’d remembered. She pulled it out of the bag, set it on the edge of his booth table, the metal warm from being pressed against her side all day. “Yeah. Tried to take it apart myself a few weeks ago, made it worse. Figured it was a lost cause.”
Tito picked it up, turned it over in his hands, felt the grit in the spool, the worn engraving of her name on the side, faded from 38 years of salt water and use. He knew the town would lose its mind if they saw him talking to her, let alone offering to help her. He’d spent 12 years building his invisible little life, no drama, no questions, no one in his business. He stared at her for a second, saw the way she was leaning in, her shoulder barely an inch from his, no hint of self-consciousness, like she didn’t care who was staring. He thought about the empty dinner table at his house, the quiet of his workshop when he was working late, the way he’d gotten so used to being alone he’d forgotten what it felt like to have someone to talk to who didn’t care about fishing reels or the stupid town gossip.
“I can fix it,” he said, before he could talk himself out of it. “No charge. You can drop by my place tomorrow. Six in the morning, before anyone’s up. No one will see you.”
She held eye contact for three full seconds, longer than polite, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “I’ll bring coffee. The dark roast from the roaster on Main Street. Not that weak diner swill you’ve been drinking all weekend.” She nodded at his half-empty travel mug sitting on the table, and he realized she’d been paying attention to him too, even when he’d been pretending she didn’t exist.
She left 20 minutes later, when the fair started shutting down, waving at him over her shoulder as she carried her boxes of books to her beat up Subaru. He didn’t wave back, not wanting to draw the attention of the group of church ladies lingering by the food truck, but he tucked her reel into his toolbox carefully, like it was something worth holding onto.
He was up at 5:30 the next morning, wiping dust off his workbench even though he’d cleaned it three days prior, half convinced he’d made a mistake inviting her. He kept glancing out the front window, half scared she wouldn’t show, half scared someone would see her pull up. He heard her tires crunch on the gravel driveway at 5:58, saw her get out of the car, holding a paper coffee cup in one hand and a jar of homemade blackberry jam in the other, the label scrawled in her messy cursive. He opened the front door before she could knock, the sound of the ocean crashing against the bluff loud behind him. She stepped over the threshold, her work boot brushing his ankle, and he didn’t even glance out the window to check if anyone was watching.
