Manny Ruiz, 53, has run a 12-acre oyster farm outside Beaufort, South Carolina, for 14 years, ever since he quit his job as a state environmental regulator and walked away from a marriage that collapsed when his ex-wife left him for the real estate developer he’d testified against in a wetland destruction case. He’s spent the last 12 years avoiding any kind of non-work interaction that could lead to vulnerability, keeps his social circle limited to the guy who runs the local bait shop and his 72-year-old neighbor who drops off pickled okra on his porch every other Sunday. He only heads into town once a week for supplies, and only stays for the monthly coastal conservation board happy hour if the beer is cold and the crowd isn’t too loud.
He’s leaning against the scuffed pine bar of The Salty Crab that Tuesday, a sweating can of Pabst in his calloused right hand, when Clara Hale sits down two stools over. He recognizes her immediately—she’s the new county coastal resource manager, the one who’d torn into that same developer an hour earlier at the board meeting, calling out his plan to bulldoze 40 acres of seagrass nesting habitat for a luxury vacation home complex. Manny had nodded along from the back of the room, didn’t say a word, didn’t want to draw attention to the longstanding grudge everyone in town already knew he held. She orders bourbon neat, twists her work boots against the sticky floor, and glances over at him, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a half-smile. He nods back, looks away fast, stares at the jukebox blaring Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” like it’s the most interesting thing in the room.
The bar back slams a crate of clean highball glasses down on the bar between them ten minutes later. One slips off the edge, and both of them reach for it at the same time. Their hands brush, his rough from 14 years of hauling oyster cages and scraping barnacles off hulls, hers softer but with a faint, silvery scar slicing across the knuckle of her index finger. She laughs, a low, warm sound that cuts through the hum of chatter and the crash of waves through the screen door, and tucks a strand of dark hair behind her ear. “Clumsy as hell around heavy glass,” she says, picking up the glass and setting it back in the crate. He holds up his left hand, shows her the three thin, pale scars running across his palm from a similar incident three years earlier, when a crate of shucking knives slipped off his boat dock. “Same,” he says, and he’s surprised at how rough his own voice sounds, like he hasn’t talked to anyone who isn’t ordering oysters in weeks.
She leans in a little closer, their shoulders now only an inch apart, and squints at the scars. He can smell coconut shampoo and salt on her, can see the faint smudge of marsh mud on the cuff of her navy blazer that no one else in the room would notice, the chipped navy polish on her nails, the tiny silver turtle stud in her left ear. He’s suddenly hyper-aware of the fact that he hasn’t been this close to a woman he isn’t related to in over a decade, that part of him is screaming to make an excuse, pay his tab, and drive back to his quiet, empty cottage where no one can get close enough to hurt him. The other part of him, the part he thought he’d buried when he signed the divorce papers, is curious, warm, hungry for the kind of conversation that doesn’t revolve around harvest yields or water salinity levels.
She mentions she was out to his farm last month, ran unannounced water quality tests while he was out hauling cages, was blown away by the artificial reefs he’d built around his oyster lines to support juvenile sea turtles and native crabs. No one ever notices the reefs. Everyone only ever asks how much he sells a bushel of oysters for, if he can cater their wedding or their kid’s graduation party. He stares at her for a beat, shocked, and she grins, taps the bar with her bourbon glass. “I’m trying to get a state grant to roll out that same model across every oyster farm in the county,” she says. “I’d kill for a tour sometime, if you’re willing. I’ve got a thousand questions.”
He hesitates for half a second, the old, bitter voice in his head telling him she’s just going to use him for his data, that anyone associated with the county is just as bad as the developer who took his wife. Then he looks at her, at the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles, at the mud on her blazer, and the voice goes quiet. “High tide’s at 3 tomorrow,” he says. “You can meet me at the dock at the end of Lowcountry Lane. I’ve got an extra life jacket.” She laughs, pulls a crumpled napkin and a ballpoint pen out of her bag, scrawls her number across it, and slides it across the bar, her fingers brushing his again, intentional this time, no slipping glass to blame. She holds eye contact for three beats longer than polite, the corner of her mouth tugging up again. “I’ll bring the bourbon,” she says.
He leaves the bar 20 minutes later, the napkin folded tight in the pocket of his flannel work shirt, the beer buzz warm in his chest, the salt wind stinging his cheeks as he walks to his beat-up Ford F-150. He doesn’t drive straight home to his cottage and the frozen meatloaf dinner he’d planned on eating alone in front of the weather channel. He detours past the farm dock, parks on the side of the dirt road, and walks down to make sure the old pine picnic table he keeps there is cleared off, picks up the three empty beer cans some teenagers left there the weekend before. He stops at the bait shop on the drive home, picks up a new set of heavy-duty work gloves, and makes a mental note to grab that jar of pickled okra his neighbor dropped off last week to set out on the picnic table tomorrow.
