Rafe Marquez, 57, makes his living carving custom cork handles and wrapping fishing rod guides in neon thread for clients up and down the Pacific Northwest, and he’d rather sand fiberglass for 12 hours straight than make small talk at a town fundraiser. His best friend, the fire department’s lead paramedic, had literally dragged him out of his shop at 4 p.m., swearing the chili cookoff had better beer than the dive bar down the street, and Rafe had caved mostly because he’d forgotten to eat lunch that day. He was halfway through a bowl of venison chili so rich it made his eyebrows lift when he reached for the last slice of honey cornbread on the communal table at the same time as a woman he’d never seen before.
Their hands brushed first, knuckles knocking lightly, before their palms pressed together for half a beat too long to be polite. Rafe felt the faint, rough callus on the side of her right index finger, the kind you get from turning thousands of book pages, and when he glanced up, she was already looking at him, dark eyes crinkling at the corners like she was holding back a laugh. She was maybe a couple years younger than him, streaks of silver threading through her loose braid, wearing a worn gray flannel shirt over a flowy blue sundress, scuffed white hiking boots on her feet. The air around her smelled like pine soap and homemade blackberry jam, sharp and sweet, and Rafe realized he was still holding his hand halfway to the cornbread like an idiot. “Sorry,” he mumbled, pulling back, but she shook her head, picked up the slice, and split it evenly down the middle with her thumbnail, handing him half. “You looked like you needed it more than I do,” she said, and her voice was low, warm, like she spent most of her time talking quiet instead of yelling over crowd noise.
She was Elara, the new county librarian, she told him, moved to town three months prior from Portland, sick of traffic and overpriced cold brew that tasted like burnt cardboard. Rafe nodded, he’d seen the “new librarian” welcome signs taped to the grocery store bulletin board, but he hadn’t set foot in the local library since he was 12 checking out dog-eared books on deep sea fishing. He’d always figured librarians were the type to side-eye his tattered stack of Louis L’Amour paperbacks and the sawdust permanently crusted under his fingernails, so he’d avoided the place on purpose. Then she held up her left wrist, tugging the flannel sleeve down to show him a faded tattoo of a chinook salmon curling around her wrist, and his carefully built resistance cracked a little. “I’ve been trying to find someone to build me a custom steelhead rod,” she said, leaning in a little so he could hear her over the band playing old Merle Haggard covers by the stage, her shoulder brushing his bicep when a group of teens ran past yelling about winning the cake walk. “Everyone keeps saying you’re the guy to talk to, but I was scared you’d chase me off your porch with a sanding block before I could ask.”
Rafe snorted, a loud, rough sound he didn’t make around most people. He’d spent eight years deliberately cultivating that gruff, unapproachable vibe after his ex-wife left, saying he cared more about his stack of fiberglass rod blanks than he ever cared about her. He’d gotten used to being alone, eating frozen meatloaf dinners on his workbench, spending weekends fishing by himself on the Siuslaw River, no one to nag him about coming home late covered in fish slime and river mud. The last thing he needed was to let someone new into that rhythm, to mess up the quiet routine he’d built that kept him from feeling like he was missing something he couldn’t name. But Elara kept talking, telling him about fishing with her dad on the Umpqua River when she was a kid, about how she’d broken her last rod reeling in a 12-pound steelhead last winter, and he found himself leaning in too, matching her proximity, his arm pressed to hers the whole time, no space between them. She held eye contact when she talked, didn’t glance away or check her phone every two minutes, like every word he said mattered, even when he was rambling about the difference between graphite and fiberglass blanks for cold water fishing.
When the charity auction started up inside the community center, the announcer yelling into a crackling microphone about a free boat tune-up, they slipped out the back, leaning against the bed of Rafe’s beat-up 1998 F150, watching the sunset paint the sky pink and tangerine over the Pacific Ocean a mile west. Elara had brought a jar of her homemade blackberry jam for the auction, she told him, but she’d baked a whole pie that morning, left it cooling on her kitchen counter under a gingham tea towel. “You wanna come over and try it?” she asked, tilting her head up to look at him, her breath fogging a little in the cool coastal air, her hand brushing his where it rested on the truck’s dented tailgate. Rafe hesitated for half a second, the old stubborn part of him screaming to go home to his quiet shop, to not risk the mess of letting someone get close enough to disappoint him again. But then she smiled, and he could see the tiny scar on her upper lip she’d mentioned earlier, from when she’d fallen off her bike chasing a stray cat at 10 years old, and the words were out of his mouth before he could think twice. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d like that a lot.”
Her house was three blocks from the community center, tucked between two towering western red cedar trees, a chipped white porch swing hanging off the front. They walked slow, their knuckles brushing every other step until Rafe tentatively laced his fingers through hers, calluses bumping against each other, and she squeezed his hand so tight he could feel the pressure in his knuckles. She unlocked the front door, the warm smell of cinnamon and baked berries spilling out into the cool night, and she tugged his hand a little to pull him across the threshold.
