Rudy Galvez, 62, retired northern Minnesota waterfowl refuge manager, has sat in the same chipped vinyl booth at the Duluth VFW’s weekly fish fry every Friday for eight years, ever since his wife Karen died of ovarian cancer. His biggest flaw is that he’s spent those years actively pushing away any attention from women, convinced even a casual coffee would be a betrayal of the 34 years he and Karen had together. He wears the same faded olive refuge jacket every week, work boots caked with lake mud, hands gnarled from decades of hauling duck banding nets, fixing hunting blinds, cutting back alder along the refuge’s marsh trails. He’s halfway through his usual plate of beer-battered cod, coleslaw, and crusty rye bread when someone slides into the booth across from him uninvited.
It’s Clara Marlow, 42, the kid he hired as a seasonal refuge tech when she was 22, fresh out of the university’s wildlife biology program. He’d had to lay her off ten years prior, when the state gutted the refuge’s operating budget, and he’d avoided running into her ever since, guilt eating at him for years over the way he’d had to hand her that pink slip two weeks before Christmas. She’s got a smudge of charcoal on her left cheek, her blonde braid coming loose at the nape, wearing a well-worn red flannel and steel-toe work boots scuffed the same way his are. The air between them smells like fried fish, apple cider vinegar, old beer, and the pine hand soap she uses, a faint whiff of vanilla lip balm drifting over when she leans in to say hello.
He blinks, sets his fork down, fumbles for a greeting that doesn’t sound like he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. She laughs, warm and low, tells him she just got hired as the refuge’s new full-time manager, started last week. She’s spent the past decade working at a refuge in Wisconsin, jumped at the chance to come back north. She talks about the blind he built back in 1998, how the maintenance crew fixed the rotting floorboards last month, how the wood ducks are still nesting in the wooden boxes he hammered together along the west shore of the marsh. Her knee brushes his under the table by accident, he flinches first, then doesn’t shift his leg away.
The voice in the back of his head snarls that he’s being ridiculous, that he’s 20 years older than her, that Karen would roll her eyes so hard she’d sprain something if she saw him sitting here overthinking a stray knee brush. He’s disgusted with himself for noticing how the dim overhead light catches the gold flecks in her green eyes, how her sleeve rides up when she reaches for the bottle of vinegar on the table, her wrist brushing his when she sets it back down. He can feel the callus on the heel of her palm, same as his, from years of holding a chainsaw, hauling gear through muck, and he spots the thin white scar on her left knuckle, from the day she cut herself on a splintered duck box when she was 23, he’d patched her up right there in the shop, gave her a neon pink band-aid he kept in his work vest for the kid groups that visited the refuge. She tells him she always had a crush on him back when she worked for him, that he was the only guy on the crew who didn’t treat her like a token female hire, who taught her how to band ducklings without hurting them, how to read the wind to tell when a storm was coming in off the lake.
He sits there for a full ten seconds, heart hammering in his chest, fighting the urge to lean across the table and wipe that charcoal smudge off her cheek with his thumb. He thinks about the empty cabin he goes home to every night, the stack of half-finished wood duck carvings on his workbench, the way he hasn’t laughed this hard in years. He asks her if she wants to come back to his place after, see the carvings, have a cup of coffee. She nods, grinning, tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
They walk out to his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150 together, the October air cold enough to make their breath fog, frost crunching under their boots. She slips on a patch of black ice on the sidewalk, grabs his arm to steady herself, his hand resting on her waist for a beat, her skin warm through the thin flannel of her shirt. He opens the passenger side door for her, she climbs in, taps the worn refuge sticker on the dash with her finger, and laughs when he tells her Karen put that there the day he brought the truck home new. He climbs into the driver’s seat, turns the key, the truck rumbles to life, and he reaches over to turn the heat up for her before he pulls out of the parking lot.
