Manny Ruiz, 52, makes his living rebuilding vintage outboard motors out of a cinder block shop on the edge of Pensacola, Florida. He’s the kind of guy who catalogs every gasket in his shop by size and manufacturer, who eats the same tuna melt for lunch six days a week, who hasn’t let anyone rearrange his tool bench in the 8 years since his divorce. His biggest flaw, if you ask his only regular employee, is that he runs from anything he can’t fix with a socket wrench and a tube of marine grease. He’d avoided his ex-wife’s entire family for a decade out of a misplaced sense of respect, even though he’d gotten along with all of them better than he ever got along with her.
He froze immediately, stammering an apology, ready to brush past before he recognized her. Lila. His ex-wife’s younger sister, the one who’d crashed on his couch half a dozen times during her final year of college, the one who’d brought him homemade chicken noodle soup when his ex bailed on taking care of him during a brutal flu in 2001. She was 47 now, her dark hair streaked with a thin line of silver at the temple, gold hoop earrings glinting in the string lights strung between the oak trees, the same hoops she’d worn to his wedding 22 years earlier. She laughed, not angry, swatting his arm lightly with the back of her hand. “Easy there, Ruiz. You still move like you’re late to a redfish tournament.”
The shock hit him first, then a hot, twisting flush of shame. This was a line he’d never let himself even think about crossing. She was his ex’s sister. That was the kind of drama that tore families apart, the kind of messy, unplanned thing he’d spent 8 years running from. But she didn’t step back. She leaned against the picnic table next to him, her knee brushing his when she shifted to get a better look at the Evinrude on the raffle display behind him. “You rebuilt that? It’s gorgeous. I remember you working on that exact model in the garage back when y’all lived in Tampa.”
He sat down without thinking, and they talked for an hour. She was in town to help their mom move into a retirement community a half hour west, she’d finalized her own divorce six months earlier from the real estate broker who’d cheated on her with a client. Every time she laughed, she leaned in a little closer, her shoulder pressing to his. When she passed him an extra hushpuppy off her plate, her fingertips brushed his knuckles, and neither of them pulled away for a full three seconds. He couldn’t stop looking at the small scar above her left eyebrow, the one she’d gotten when she tripped over his tackle box on that couch all those years ago. The air between them hummed, thick enough to cut with a pocket knife, the noise of the fish fry fading into background static.
When the band switched to a slow, twangy George Strait deep cut, she nodded toward the tiny patch of packed dirt they were using as a dance floor. “You still dance as terrible as you did at your wedding?” she teased, her dark eyes holding his, no trace of humor in the line of her jaw. He wanted to say no, wanted to make an excuse about having to get back to the shop to finish a motor for a client, wanted to run from the thing he couldn’t control. But he stood up instead, held out his hand.
She fit against him like she’d been made to. Her hand in his was warm, calloused at the fingertips from the pottery she’d told him she makes now, her other arm slung loose over his shoulder, their chests almost touching when they swayed off beat to the music. He could smell coconut shampoo, the same scent she’d worn when she was 22 and stumbling into his apartment at 2 a.m. after a bad date. He didn’t overthink it, didn’t run through the list of reasons this was a bad idea. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since you brought me that soup in 2001,” he said, quiet enough only she could hear.
She tilted her chin up, her mouth curling into a small, knowing smile. “Took you long enough. I’ve only been waiting 25 years.”
He kissed her right there on the dance floor, the whoops from the old guys at the picnic table behind them fading out entirely. They left 10 minutes later, her hand laced in his, his truck windows rolled down so the Gulf breeze could curl through the cab. He carried her over the threshold of his bungalow, the same one he’d fixed up entirely by himself over the last 8 years, and didn’t worry about the mess he’d left on the kitchen counter or the gasket order he had to fill when the sun came up.
