Ronan O’Malley, 62, retired commercial salmon fisherman, has held the same petty grudge for 18 years. He’d spent most of his adult life on the cold chop of the Pacific, hauling 80-pound nets over the rail of his boat until a rotator cuff tear forced him to sell the *Sea Sprite* three years back, and he still carries the stubborn, unforgiving edge of a man who’s had to fight for every good thing he’s ever had. His biggest flaw? He never lets a perceived slight go, even when the edges of the memory have faded so bad he can barely remember what started it in the first place. That Friday, he’s lingering at the Astoria pier’s annual chili cookoff, salt stinging the raw spot on his cheek where he nicked himself shaving that morning, a paper bowl of three-alarm venison chili warming his calloused palms, when he spots her.
Maeve Carter. His ex-wife’s younger cousin, the woman he’d screamed at so loud in the town dive bar back in 2005 half the regulars still bring it up to rib him. He’d avoided every event she might be at since she moved back to town six months prior, after 20 years working as an ER nurse in Portland and a messy divorce from a high school math teacher. He’d convinced himself she was still the reckless, sharp-tongued 20-something who’d gotten him in hot water with his ex, who’d punched him in the shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise after he yelled at her that night. He turns to grab an extra napkin from the table behind him, boots catching on a loose splinter of the pier boardwalk, and slams right into her.
She’s holding a jar of homemade blackberry jam, the label scrawled in her loopy cursive, and his hand shoots out to catch it before it smashes on the wood. Their fingers brush for half a second, her skin softer than he expects, scented with lavender hand cream and the faint tang of berry juice, and he freezes. She’s only a few inches shorter than him, her auburn hair streaked with silver pulled back in a loose braid, hazel eyes flecked with gold locking onto his without flinching. She smirks, the same half-teasing grin she wore back when they were younger, and nods at the chili sloshing over the edge of his bowl onto his flannel sleeve. “Still as clumsy as you were when you spilled a full pint of Pabst on my white cowboy boots at that 2005 New Year’s party, huh?”
He huffs a laugh he didn’t know he had in him, wiping the chili off his sleeve with the back of his hand. He expects the old surge of irritation, the sharp retort on the tip of his tongue, but it doesn’t come. The bluegrass band at the end of the pier is playing a slow Johnny Cash cover, the wind carrying the smell of fried dough and saltwater, and for a second he can’t remember why he was mad at her in the first place. He brings up the fight, finally, the one that ended with them not speaking for almost two decades, and her grin fades, her eyebrows lifting in surprise. She tells him she never said a word to his ex about him flirting with her that night. His ex had already been cheating on him with the guy who ran the bait shop down the pier, had lied to make Ronan feel guilty so she wouldn’t have to admit she’d been the one breaking their marriage apart.
It hits him like a wave to the chest, all that anger he carried for 18 years dissolving so fast he feels lightheaded. He leans against the pier rail, and she steps closer, her shoulder brushing his, the warmth of her seeping through his thick flannel. She tells him she’d had a crush on him since she was 22, when he first brought the *Sea Sprite* into the pier, sunburnt and laughing, carrying a cooler full of salmon he’d handed out to every kid on the dock. She’d been too shy to say anything back then, had thought the fight meant he hated her, had avoided him just as much as he’d avoided her since she moved back. A gust of wind blows a loose strand of her hair across his face, soft as down, and he lifts his hand to tuck it behind her ear, his thumb brushing the edge of her cheek. She doesn’t pull away.
The cookoff wraps up as the sun dips below the horizon, painting the sky streaks of pink and orange, and the crowd starts to drift toward the bars downtown. He asks her if she wants to get a beer at the dive bar they used to frequent, the one with the peanut shells on the floor and the old jukebox that only plays 70s country. She says yes, but only if he buys her a slice of their famous huckleberry pie too. He holds the door open for her when they get to the bar, and she brushes her hand against his as she steps inside, her fingers lacing through his for half a second before she pulls away to find an empty booth by the window.
