Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 38 years hauling salmon out of the Columbia River’s frigid chop before he sold his boat, The Sea Hag, last spring. His knuckles bear permanent scars from winch malfunctions, his left knee aches when the barometer drops, and his biggest flaw is that he’s spent the 12 years since his wife left convincing himself no woman could ever be interested in him for anything more than a discount on a restored fishing reel. He’d been roped into manning a booth at the annual Astoria Crab Festival that Saturday, selling the reels he refurbishes out of his garage, and the first three hours had been nothing but bored teens pestering him about deep sea fishing and old fishing buddies slapping him on the back and offering cheap beer.
The wind picked up around 2 p.m., sharp with the briny tang of the river and the sweet, greasy smell of fried dough from the food truck two rows over. The pop-up tent next to his, manned by the local community college’s culinary program, started listing to the left, its metal poles groaning under the weight of a sudden downpour. Ronan hopped over the low barrier between their booths without thinking, grabbing the closest pole to yank it back upright, his forearm brushing the soft curve of the waist of the woman running the display as he did. She smelled like lemon zest and ground cinnamon, like the apple turnovers his grandma used to bake when he was a kid, and she laughed, bright and warm, as she grabbed the other pole to hold it steady. “You just saved my entire batch of smoked salmon pate tarts,” she said, wiping a raindrop off her cheek with the back of her hand. Her name was Elara, she told him, she taught pastry classes two nights a week at the college, and she’d driven down from Seaside that morning with a cooler full of samples.
Ronan mumbled a half-coherent reply and ducked back to his own booth, embarrassed that his face had gone pink, that he’d stared at the flecks of gold in her hazel eyes a second too long. He told himself she was just being polite, that she’d never look twice at a guy who still had fish grease under his fingernails that he couldn’t scrub off, who owned three shirts total and had a couch with a tear in the arm from his old hound dog. But he kept glancing over at her booth, watching her laugh as she handed out samples of crab beignets, watching the way her dark curly hair bounced when she leaned down to talk to a little kid who’d wandered over.
Forty minutes later, she showed up at his booth holding a paper plate with two still-warm beignets dusted with powdered sugar. “Payment for saving the tarts,” she said, setting the plate down on his folding table. Their hands brushed when she pushed the plate toward him, and he felt the rough callus on the pad of her thumb, from years of rolling dough, and something tight in his chest loosened a little. She asked about the scar across his left knuckle, and he told her about the time a winch snapped when he was 28, sliced his hand open 30 miles out to sea, and he’d had to stitch it up himself with fishing line and a bottle of bourbon. She didn’t wince, didn’t look horrified like most people did when he told that story. She just nodded, and held up her own left hand, showing him a thin white scar across her palm, from a time she’d sliced her hand open with a pastry knife when she was working at a bakery in Portland, had to finish the wedding cake she was decorating before she drove herself to the ER.
By the time the festival started wrapping up at 7, the rain had slowed to a soft drizzle, and the crowd had thinned out to just the vendors packing up their booths. He was stacking his restored reels into a plastic tote when she walked over, holding a thermos of hot spiced cider, and offered him a cup. They stood under the eave of the nearby snack shack to drink it, their shoulders pressed together because the overhang was so narrow, and he could feel the heat of her arm through his flannel shirt, could hear the faint sound of Johnny Cash playing from a speaker across the fairground. He’d spent the whole afternoon fighting the urge to touch her, to brush the rain droplet off her cheek, to tuck a strand of her curly hair behind her ear, and he finally let his hand rest lightly on her elbow, his calloused fingers brushing the soft fabric of her sweater.
She didn’t pull away. She smiled up at him, and said she had a whole Dungeness crab in her cooler, and a bottle of 12-year Irish whiskey at her cabin outside Seaside, and she was terrible at cracking crab without making a mess. She asked if he wanted to come over, help her steam it, tell her more stories about fishing out on the Columbia. He hesitated for half a second, thinking about the frozen pepperoni pizza waiting in his freezer at home, the old fishing documentary he’d planned to watch alone that night, all the nights he’d spent alone the past 12 years. Then he nodded, and said yeah, he knew a thing or two about cracking crab.
He grabbed her box of display dishes to carry to her truck, and she slung the cooler with the crab over her other shoulder, and they walked through the drizzle, laughing when a gust of wind blew rain in their faces. They climbed into the cab of her old pickup, and she turned the key, and the radio blared Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” the second the engine turned over. He reached over to turn it up a little, his hand brushing hers where it rested on the dial, and she laced her fingers through his for three slow beats before she put the truck in drive.
