Rico Marquez, 53, carves custom fishing lures for a living out of a cinder block workshop behind his house outside Coos Bay, Oregon. He’s got a scar across his right palm from a slip with a carving knife three years back, and a flaw he’s well aware of: he’d rather sand cedar for 12 hours straight than make small talk with anyone at the town’s endless string of fundraisers and potlucks. He’s been widowed seven years, and most folks in town have given up trying to set him up, which is exactly how he likes it. He only showed up to the fire department’s annual summer cookout because his old high school buddy who runs the station begged him to donate three of his top-tier bass lures for the silent auction, and he owed the guy a favor for pulling his truck out of a ditch last winter.
He’s leaning against the chest-high beer cooler, wiping a fine layer of cedar sawdust off the knee of his worn Carhartts, when the collision happens. She reaches for a black cherry seltzer at the exact same time he grabs a pale ale, their knuckles brushing hard enough that he drops his beer can a half inch before he catches it. She laughs, low and warm, and he smells pine sol and orange peel on her, the faint tang of campfire smoke clinging to the cuff of her forest ranger uniform. He’s seen her around town before, new to the district, moved up from California three months prior, but he’s never been close enough to notice the tiny constellation of freckles across her nose, or the thin silver scar running the length of her left forearm.
“Sorry about that,” she says, twisting the cap off her seltzer. “Heard the guy who donated those lures in the silent auction is a total hermit. You know him?”
Rico snorts, takes a sip of his beer. “Guilty. Though I prefer ‘selectively social’ over hermit.”
She grins, leans against the cooler a foot away from him, close enough that he can feel the heat off her shoulder through his flannel. They talk for 40 minutes straight, first about the lures, then about how her dad used to carve lures in his garage outside Sacramento before he passed last spring, leaving a half-finished box of them she’s too intimidated to touch. He finds himself telling her about his wife, how she used to sit in his workshop and paint the tiny eyes on the lures while he carved, and he doesn’t even feel the usual tightness in his chest when he says her name. A small part of him screams that he’s being disloyal, that he should pack up and go home to his quiet workshop and his old reruns of westerns, but the larger part of him can’t look away from the way her eyes light up when she talks about fishing with her dad as a kid.
He almost bails when the auction ends, makes an excuse about having a piece of cedar he needs to finish shaping before the humidity rises, but she steps off the curb wrong as they’re walking toward the parking lot, her boot catching on a crack in the asphalt, and he grabs her by the waist to keep her from falling. Her hair falls in his face for half a second, that pine and orange peel scent wrapping around him, and her hand rests on his chest for three beats before she pulls away, her cheeks pink. The noise of the cookout fades for a second, the yelling kids and the country music playing over the speakers and the crackle of the charcoal grills all distant, and for the first time in seven years he doesn’t feel guilty for wanting to be this close to someone who isn’t his wife.
He fishes a crumpled slip of lure packaging out of his pocket, scrawls his cell number and his workshop address on the back with a carpenter’s pencil he keeps tucked behind his ear. “Come by Saturday around 10,” he says, handing it to her. “Bring the box of your dad’s lures. I’ve got extra sandpaper, and I’ll even spring for donuts if you bring that cold brew you said you drink every morning.”
She tucks the slip into the breast pocket of her uniform, taps it twice with her finger. “Donuts better be glazed,” she says, turning to walk to her beat up Ford Ranger parked three spots down.
Rico leans against the hood of his own truck, sipping the last of his beer, and watches her reverse out of the spot, waving once out the window before she pulls onto the main road. The sun is dipping below the treeline, painting the sky pink and orange, and he tucks his hands into his pockets, smiling to himself when he realizes he’s already making a mental list of supplies to pick up on Friday on his way into town.
