Manny Ruiz is 59, retired commercial abalone diver, a thick silvery scar snaking 12 inches down his left calf from a run-in with a juvenile great white back in 2017 that made him hang up his wetsuit for good. He’s avoided the annual Garibaldi fire department chili cookoffs for the past three years, only showed up today because his old dive buddy’s 22-year-old kid just joined the crew, begged him to come sample his team’s entry. He’s perched on the edge of a splintered folding picnic table, cold beer sweating through his faded Carhartt flannel, paper bowl of lukewarm chili in one hand, his 7-year-old golden retriever Maverick curled at his feet gnawing on a discarded corndog bun, ignoring every half-hearted attempt at small talk from passersby. He holds grudges like they’re prized abalone pearls, hoards them, refuses to let go, ever since his wife Elara passed four years prior and half the town showed up at his cabin with watery casseroles and pitying looks he never asked for.
The last person he expects to sidle up next to him is Lila Hart. He recognizes her immediately, the wife of the real estate developer he got in a screaming match with six months back, the guy trying to block public access to the little cove Manny dived for decades to build a row of $2 million vacation rentals only out-of-state rich folks could afford. Manny’s jaw tightens when he catches a whiff of her first: pine dish soap, cherry hard candy, no fancy floral perfume like he’d braced for. She’s wearing a well-worn plaid flannel over a thin white tank top, cutoffs caked with mud at the hem, bare legs freckled all the way up to her thighs, hair pulled back with a frayed leather cord. She leans past him for a stack of paper napkins on the table behind him, her shoulder brushing his hard enough that his beer sloshes over the edge onto his wrist. She apologizes, low and warm, not the snooty, sharp tone he’d braced for.
He hands her a napkin before he thinks better of it, their fingers brushing when she takes it. Her skin is cool, calloused at the index finger from turning thousands of book pages, he learns a second later when she says she’s the new head librarian at the town’s tiny public branch, moved back to town three years ago to take care of her grandma before she passed, got roped into marrying that asshole developer two years back, and she’s been fighting him behind the scenes on the beach access suit for months, she says, like she can read the annoyance written all over his face. Manny blinks. He’d written her off as another stuck up rich bitch by association, had half a dozen snarky one-liners ready to fire off, and they all die on his tongue.
She stays there, leaning against the table next to him, close enough that he can feel the heat off her arm through the sleeve of his flannel, no respect for personal space, apparently. She laughs at his dry joke about the fire department’s chili tasting like someone dumped a handful of chili powder into diesel fuel, loud and bright, throws her head back a little when she does it, a small silver hoop earring catching the late afternoon sun. He finds himself telling her about the time he got caught in a riptide 30 miles off the coast, spent 12 hours bobbing in the water waiting for the coast guard to find him, the way the water glowed bioluminescent all around him like he was floating in a sea of stars. She listens, doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t give him that pitying look everyone else does when he talks about the old diving days.
The psychological whiplash hits him hard. He’s disgusted with himself for even entertaining this, for talking to the wife of the guy he still wants to punch in the mouth, for noticing the way her tank top gapes a little when she leans forward to scratch Maverick behind the ears, for wanting to reach out and tuck the stray piece of hair that’s fallen loose from her ponytail behind her ear. He told himself four years ago he was done with all of it, done with wanting anything that wasn’t his cedar cabin, his dog, his quiet unchanging routine that never disappointed him.
She shifts closer, her knee brushing his now, intentional, not an accident. She says her husband left town at 6 a.m. that morning, texted her he was filing for divorce, moving to Palm Springs with his 26-year-old assistant. She says she’s been seeing him walking Maverick on the beach at sunrise for months, used to bring her grandma down to that cove to hunt for agates when she was a kid, has been wanting to talk to him forever but was scared he’d tell her to go to hell before she could get a word out. She touches his wrist, slow, fingers pressing just hard enough against the old scar there from a diving knife accident, says she’s got a bottle of 12-year-old tequila stashed at her grandma’s old cottage a half mile down the road from his place, if he wants to come over later, they can drink it, brainstorm how to make her soon-to-be ex-husband drop the beach access suit for good.
Manny hesitates for half a beat, thinks about the frozen meatloaf dinner waiting in his fridge, the quiet empty house he’d go home to otherwise, the way her eyes crinkle at the corners when she smiles like she knows something he doesn’t. He nods, takes a sip of his warm beer, tells her he’ll bring the batch of chili he smoked over oak yesterday that tastes a hell of a lot better than the swill the fire department’s serving up. She grins, grabs a napkin from the stack, scribbles her address on it in blue ballpoint pen, presses it into his palm, her fingers lingering for a full second longer than necessary before she pulls her hand away. She turns to walk back to her group of friends by the grill, glances over her shoulder once to wink at him before she disappears into the crowd.
