Ray Voss, 62, sat in his usual vinyl booth at the Duluth VFW’s Friday fish fry, the scuffed edge of the table digging into his ribs the way it had every week for the past two years, ever since he sold his walleye guiding business and had nowhere better to be. The air smelled like fried cod batter, cheap draft beer, pine-scented floor cleaner, and the faint woolly tang of the hunting coats slung over the backs of half the seats. He’d finished his first plate of fish ten minutes prior, was picking at a heap of cold crinkle-cut fries, and nursing his second Budweiser, the glass cold enough to prickle the calluses on his fingertips. He’d avoided the weekly meat raffle that night, had no interest in hauling home a 10-pound pack of ground beef he’d never cook, and was half-listening to a group of old iron workers argue about the new chain grocery store trying to break ground on the west side of town.
The bell above the front door jingled, and he looked up out of habit. Elara Marquez stood there, brushing frost off the collar of her waxed canvas jacket, her dark hair streaked with silver pulled back in a loose braid. She ran the local food co-op, the one fighting that same grocery store chain tooth and nail, and she was the ex-wife of his former best friend, the guy he’d stopped talking to in 2013 after a dispute over a tournament prize purse that got so ugly they’d almost come to blows on the boat ramp. He’d not said two words to her in a decade, had always written her off as off-limits, a line he didn’t cross no matter how much time passed. She scanned the crowded room, saw the only empty seat was across from him, hesitated for half a second, then walked over, holding a paper cup of spiked apple cider. “Mind if I crash? My roommate bailed on me last minute, and I don’t feel like standing by the bar for an hour,” she said, her voice warm, a little rough around the edges from years of smoking menthols she’d quit three years prior. He nodded before he could talk himself out of it, sliding his pile of lure catalogs to the side to make room for her plate.
She sat close, closer than a stranger would, her shoulder almost brushing his across the narrow booth. He caught a whiff of lavender hand lotion mixed with cinnamon from her cider, and something tight in his chest loosened, a feeling he hadn’t had since his wife left him seven years prior, when he’d started swearing off any kind of romantic connection entirely, too stubborn to admit he was lonely. When she reached across the table to grab the ketchup bottle, her knuckles brushed his, calloused too from hauling produce boxes at the co-op, and the tingle shot up his arm so fast he almost dropped his beer. He glanced up, caught her staring at the scar on his left wrist, the one from a 20-pound walleye that had jerked a hook through his skin back in 2007. “Still have that, huh?” she said, grinning, and he blinked, surprised she remembered. She told him she’d been at that tournament, had watched him yank the hook out himself and keep fishing, even as his wrist was bleeding all over his boat seat. They talked for 40 minutes, first about the fish fry’s terrible batter that week, then about the grocery store fight, then about his lure restoration side project he did out of his garage. He admitted he’d been dropping anonymous $50 bills in the co-op’s donation jar by the register every month, and she laughed, said she’d always suspected it was him, no one else in town fished with that specific brand of waterproof paper he’d left a receipt with once.
The nagging voice in the back of his head kept yelling that this was wrong, that his ex-best friend would lose his mind if he knew they were talking, that he was breaking some unspoken guy code he’d clung to for half his life, but he couldn’t make himself care. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, and her hair fell over one shoulder, and he kept catching glances at the small sun tattoo on her wrist, the one he’d never noticed before. She said she was driving up to her family’s cabin on Lake Vermilion the next day to close it up for the winter, had a small leak in the roof she didn’t know how to fix, and didn’t want to pay some random handyman $300 to hammer a few shingles down. He offered to come help before he could even think about it, the words spilling out of his mouth unplanned, and she grinned so wide her eyes crinkled at the corners, said she’d been hoping he’d say that. She slid her hand under the table, brushed her palm against his knee, slow and intentional, not an accident this time, and said she’d had a crush on him since 1998, when he’d jumped into the 40-degree lake fully clothed to save her 7-year-old son who’d fallen off the tournament dock. He sat there, stunned, for a full ten seconds, no snarky retort, no excuse to back out, just a warm buzz in his chest that had nothing to do with the beer.
She scrawled her cell number on a napkin, drew a lopsided walleye next to it, and slid it across the table to him, said she’d pick him up at 8 a.m. the next day, bring coffee and glazed donuts, his favorite, which she’d also remembered from the old tournament days. She left a few minutes later, waving over her shoulder as she walked out the door, and he sat there staring at the napkin for almost 20 minutes, the rest of his beer going warm on the table. The jukebox in the corner was playing Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” the fryer in the kitchen hissed and popped, and he rubbed the knuckle that had brushed hers earlier, still feeling the faint tingle. He’d spent seven years telling himself he was better off alone, that letting anyone get close was only going to end in a fight or a heartbreak, and none of that seemed to matter anymore. He tucked the napkin into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, pulled out his beat-up flip phone, and called his neighbor to ask if he could feed his tabby cat Moe for the weekend, already mentally counting the roofing nails he had in the plastic bin in his garage.
