Judd Thorne is 59, has made his living mending commercial fishing nets for the Astoria fleet for 32 years, and hasn’t set foot at the town’s annual crab boil fundraiser since his wife Elara died eight years prior. The only reason he caved this year is his 12-year-old neighbor Lila showed up on his porch last week, pigtails askew, holding a roll of tickets and saying the volunteer fire department needed new hoses, and how could he say no to the kid who leaves him chocolate chip cookies on his porch every Christmas?
He’s camped out at the farthest picnic table from the bluegrass stage, work boots propped on the lower bench, a cold IPA sweating in one hand, the wooden slats under his elbows sticky with spilled butter and soda, crumbs of corn cake stuck in the gaps. He’s half ready to slip out early when a woman drops her paper plate stacked high with Old Bay-dusted crab legs directly across from him. She’s wearing a cream cardigan over a striped tank top, round wire-rimmed glasses, and the nametag pinned to her sweater says Clara, County Librarian. Her forearm brushes his when she leans to set a jar of melted butter between them, and he catches a whiff of jasmine shampoo tangled with sea salt, sharp and sweet against the thick air of grilled sausage and steamed shellfish.
“Sorry, every other table’s packed,” she says, wiping a smudge of Old Bay off her cheek with the back of her hand, and her smile is warm enough that he doesn’t grunt and leave like he planned to ten minutes earlier. He nods instead, takes a sip of his beer, watches her crack a crab leg with a loud snap that makes a toddler at the next table giggle. She swears under her breath when a chunk of crab meat flies onto his worn navy flannel shirt, reaches across the table to pluck it off, and her fingers brush his chest through the thin fabric. He tenses, half out of surprise, half out of the old, familiar guilt that creeps up any time he pays a woman more than a passing greeting.
He’d spent the last eight years intentionally closed off, turning down invites to cookouts, to fishing trips, to the damn book club the old ladies at the grocery store kept pestering him to join, convinced that enjoying anything without Elara was some kind of betrayal. He’d built a routine so rigid it could double as a schedule: mend nets from 6 to 2, stop at the corner store for a cold beer on the way home, sit on his porch and watch the cargo ships creep over the horizon until the sun goes down. No surprises, no mess, no risk of getting hurt again.
Clara pops the piece of crab into her mouth, grins when she notices him staring. “Don’t look so horrified, I don’t bite. Unless you ask nicely.” The line is teasing, not pushy, and he snorts before he can stop himself. She tells him she moved to town three months prior, left a job at a library in Anchorage, got sick of digging her car out of three feet of snow every morning. He finds himself telling her about Elara, about how they used to come to this crab boil every year, how she’d always eat so much crab she’d have to unbutton her jeans under the table, how she’d tease him for being too cheap to buy the fancy garlic butter they sold at the concession stand.
He doesn’t realize how long he’s been talking until the bluegrass band wraps up their final set, the sky turning soft pink and tangerine over the Columbia River mouth. Clara leans forward to grab another crab leg, her wavy auburn hair falling forward to brush his forearm, and the contact sends a tingle up his arm that he hasn’t felt in close to a decade. She holds eye contact for three beats too long, a slow, knowing smile playing on her lips, and says she’s been asking about him for weeks, saw him mending nets in his garage when she walked her golden retriever past his house, wondered if he’d ever be interested in coming to the library’s monthly coastal fishing history meetup.
The guilt flares again, sharp and hot, for half a second. He thinks about Elara’s old polaroid taped to his fridge, about the way he’d promised himself he’d never let anyone else in enough to hurt this bad again. But then Clara laughs at a dumb joke he makes about the time he got a tangled net wrapped around his own feet and fell off a dock into 40-degree water, and the sound is bright, unforced, nothing like the pitying smiles he’s gotten from every other woman in town since Elara died. He realizes he hasn’t felt this light, this seen, in years.
When she asks if he wants to walk down to the pier after they finish their crab, he doesn’t hesitate. He stacks their crumpled paper plates, tosses them in the nearby trash can, and when they weave through the dispersing crowd, his hand brushes the small of her back for half a second, just long enough to let her know he’s there, not rushing her. The boardwalk is still warm from the day’s sun under his work boots, the waves lapping softly at the wooden pilings below them. When she stops to kick a broken clam shell off the edge of the boardwalk, he laughs, and realizes he can’t remember the last time he did that without forcing it.
