Manny Rios, 53, has spent the last eight years as the small coastal Texas town’s go-to vintage fishing reel restorer, and the last seven of those enforcing a self-imposed no-dating-locals rule. He lost his wife Elena to breast cancer when she was 44, and instead of working through the grief, he buried himself in cleaning ball bearings and restringing old Penns and Ambassadeurs, only leaving his cluttered workshop for volunteer fire department fundraisers—Elena had served 12 years with the department, and he couldn’t bear to skip the events she’d loved. That’s how he ends up at the annual spring crawfish boil, wiping cayenne and garlic butter off his calloused fingers onto the thigh of his faded Carhartt jeans, a raffle ticket for a fully restored 1972 Spinfisher tucked behind his ear.
The air reeks of boiled corn, beer, and the kind of cayenne that burns the inside of your nostrils if you stand too close to the cook pots. Zydeco blares from a beat-up speaker stack by the picnic tables, kids scream as they chase each other around the fairground holding whole crawfish like tiny red weapons, and a group of retired fishermen he’s known since high school keep waving him over to heckle him about still being single. He leans against the steel beer cooler, pops the tab on a Shiner Bock, and does his best to look unapproachable. It works until Jules Carter steps up beside him.
She’s 38, the town’s new librarian, the woman who showed up at his shop three weeks prior with a dented 1968 Ambassadeur her dad left her when he passed, and who he’d practically chased out the door when she’d smiled and asked him out for coffee after he fixed it. He’d panicked, thrown out some dumb line about not dating customers, and avoided the library entirely ever since. Now she’s standing six inches away, bare tanned legs sticking out of cutoff denim shorts, a faded Willie Nelson tee stretched tight across her shoulders, mud caked on the heels of her scuffed cowboy boots. She reaches past him for a beer, her upper arm brushing his bicep, and he catches a whiff of coconut shampoo and the same garlic butter he’s got caked under his nails.
“Nice to see you not hiding behind a workbench for once,” she says, grinning, her teeth white against the faint smudge of crawfish spice on her lower lip. He tenses up, ready to mumble an excuse and walk away, but she steps closer, leaning in to yell over a particularly loud accordion riff, her warm breath fanning across the shell of his ear. “I still have that reel, by the way. You never gave me a quote on fixing the drag.”
He’s torn so sharply he almost flinches. Half of him is disgusted with his own cowardice—scared of the town gossips, scared of feeling like he’s betraying Elena, scared of letting anyone get close enough to see how messy the grief still is some days. The other half is hyper aware of the way her hip is almost pressed to his, the callus on the tip of her index finger when she taps his forearm to get his attention, the way her hazel eyes don’t dart away when he meets them, like she’s not scared off by his usual gruff demeanor. He tries to step back, hits the cooler behind him, and she laughs, a low, throaty sound that makes his neck heat up.
She grabs his wrist, her hand small and rough from the community garden she runs out of the library’s back lot, and tugs him toward an empty picnic table at the edge of the fairground, far enough away from the main crowd that no one’s paying them much attention. He doesn’t pull away. They sit across from each other, a pile of peeled crawfish shells between them, and she digs the dented Ambassadeur out of the canvas tote slung over her chair, sets it down between their knees. Their legs brush under the table every time one of them shifts, and he can’t stop staring at the smattering of freckles across her nose, the way she licks butter off her thumb when she thinks he’s not looking.
He admits he was an ass when she came to the shop, tells her about the stupid rule he made for himself, about the guilt that still creeps up when he thinks about going on a date that doesn’t involve talking about reel parts. She nods, like she already knows, and tells him half the women in the town’s quilting circle have a running bet on when he’ll stop moping and ask someone out, that no one thinks he’s betraying Elena by being happy. She leans forward across the table, brushes a stray piece of crawfish shell off the front of his flannel shirt, and her hand lingers on his chest for a full three seconds, long enough for him to feel the heat of her palm through the thin fabric. “I don’t care about the rule, or the gossips,” she says, quiet enough that only he can hear it. “I just want someone who knows how to fix things instead of running from them.”
He picks up the Ambassadeur, twists the handle, feels the slight grind of the damaged drag under his thumb. He tells her he can have it fixed by Friday, if she wants to stop by his shop after closing, that he’ll even teach her how to maintain it herself so she doesn’t have to pay anyone to fix it down the line. She grins, pulls a permanent marker out of her tote, grabs his left hand, and scrawls her cell number across the back of it, the ink dark against his sun-darkened skin. She says she’ll bring the pecan pie her grandma taught her to bake, the kind with extra bourbon in the filling.
The zydeco band switches to a slow, swaying two-step, and she tugs his hand again, pulling him up from the bench. He glances over at the group of retired fishermen by the cook pots, who are hooting and waving napkins at him, and just shakes his head, smiling. He lets her lead him to the small patch of dirt that passes for a dance floor, and rests his hand on her waist, the calluses on his palm catching on the soft fabric of her tee.
