Milo Rourke, 53, makes his living restoring antique fishing reels out of a drafty two-car garage in Astoria, Oregon, and avoids small talk like he avoids rusted spool bearings and surprise rainstorms on the Columbia. Eight years prior, his wife left him for a travel nurse she met at his physical therapy appointment following a commercial fishing shoulder injury, and he’s kept everyone but the hardware store clerk and the 78-year-old VFW fry cook Mabel at arm’s length ever since. His only regular non-work outing is the Friday cod fry at the local VFW post, where he sits in the same scuffed vinyl corner booth, orders the same meal: extra vinegar coleslaw, no carrots, crispy cod, a draft Coors with barely a skim of foam on top.
The first time he sees Clara, he’s already irritated, because she’s holding his plate and she’s not Mabel. Her hair is pulled back in a messy braid streaked with thin strands of silver, her jeans are spattered with fish blood and fryer grease, her nail polish is chipped pale blue, and the coleslaw on the plate she sets down has bright orange carrot shreds sticking out of it, the beer foaming halfway up the cup. He opens his mouth to snap, but she holds up a hand before he can speak, laughing soft, the corner of her mouth crinkling like she already knows he’s a pain in the ass. “Mabel told me your order, I messed up,” she says, leaning in just enough that he can smell coconut shampoo mixed with fried batter and saltwater over the din of the post’s jukebox playing Merle Haggard. “I’ll fix it in two minutes, no charge. Don’t chew my head off.”
He blinks, taken aback, and nods before he can think better of it. She’s gone before he can say anything else, weaving between tables full of old veterans yelling about football, and he finds himself watching her as she works, the way she hoists full trays of hot fish like they weigh nothing, the way she teases a group of old Coast Guard guys without missing a beat. When she comes back with the corrected plate, her arm brushes his when she sets it down, the fabric of her flannel soft against his bare wrist, and he feels a little jolt he hasn’t felt since he was 20 and flirting with his future wife on a dock in Seaside.
She nods at the faded National Fishing Reel Collectors Association patch sewn to the breast of his jacket. “My dad had that exact same patch,” she says, leaning against the edge of his booth, one foot propped on the leg of the table. “He died last year, left a crate of 40-some reels in my basement. Everyone I’ve called to look at them wants $100 an hour just to sort through the junk ones. You do that work, right?”
He’s already shaking his head before she finishes, because he doesn’t do side jobs for strangers, doesn’t let people come to his workshop, doesn’t mess with his routine for anyone. “I charge $125 an hour,” he says, picking up his beer to take a sip, avoiding her eye. “You’re better off finding a kid just starting out.”
She snorts, pulls a crumpled napkin out of her apron pocket, scribbles a phone number on it with a ballpoint pen. “I can’t pay cash,” she says, sliding the napkin across the table, their fingers brushing when she pushes it toward him, her skin calloused and cool from grabbing cold beer mugs all night. “I work on a crab boat three days a week, I can bring you all the Dungeness you can eat, plus my grandma’s famous peach pie. I know Mabel says you never turn down peach pie.”
He stares at the napkin for 10 full seconds after she walks away, half tempted to crumple it up and throw it away, half curious. He hasn’t had good homemade pie since his ex left, hasn’t talked to anyone about old reels for fun in longer than that. He shoves the napkin in his pocket before he can overthink it, finishes his meal, and drives home.
He texts her at 9 a.m. the next morning, tells her to come by the workshop at 11, no promises about the reels. She shows up 5 minutes early, holding a paper bag with two black coffees and a Tupperware stacked with pie slices, her jeans still damp from crabbing that morning, the crate of reels strapped to the back of her beat-up pickup. The workshop smells like machine oil and cedar, the radio playing old Johnny Cash, and she hums along to Folsom Prison Blues while she hefts the crate onto his workbench.
They spend an hour going through the reels, her pointing out the ones her dad used to take her salmon fishing with when she was a kid, her knee knocking his when she leans down to grab a rusted reel from the bottom of the crate, neither of them moving away. He pulls out a 1952 Pflueger Supreme halfway through, turns it over in his hand, says it’s almost mint, just needs a new spring, worth close to $800 to the right collector. She leans over his shoulder to look, her breath warm against his neck, her left hand resting light on his upper arm for balance, and when he turns his head to tell her she should keep it instead of selling it, their mouths are barely an inch apart.
He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t overthink it, just leans in and kisses her, slow, no rush, like they’ve got all the time in the world. She tastes like coffee and cinnamon, her hand coming up to cup the side of his face, her thumb brushing the scar on his jaw from a fishing accident when he was 22. They pull back after a minute, both grinning like idiots, and she swats playfully at his shoulder. “I knew the pie would work,” she says, and he laughs, a real, loud laugh, the kind he hasn’t let out in years.
He tells her she can keep the Pflueger, no charge, says they can fix the spring together next weekend, after she brings him the crab she promised. She agrees, steals a bite of pie off his fork, and leans against the workbench next to him, their shoulders pressed together, watching the rain streak down the garage windows. He sets the Pflueger down on the workbench, laces his fingers through hers, and doesn’t even think about the stack of customer orders he was supposed to finish that day.
