Rafe Oliveira, 53, makes his living restoring vintage outboard motors out of a cinder block shop tucked between a bait shop and a laundromat on Maine’s midcoast. His biggest flaw, if you ask the few people he lets close, is that he’s spent the eight years since his wife left for a job in Portland treating routine like a suit of armor. He eats the same bacon and egg sandwich for breakfast at 6:17 every morning, locks his shop doors promptly at 5pm, and hasn’t agreed to a social engagement that didn’t involve the volunteer fire department in half a decade. He’s only at the annual clambake fundraiser because he owed the fire chief a favor, donating a fully restored 1962 Evinrude for the raffle, and he’s counting down the minutes until he can go home, crack a beer, and sand the rust off a 1968 Mercury he’s been picking at for weeks.
The air smells like briny lobster butter, charred corn, and seaweed rotting at the tide line. He’s leaned up against a splintered pine picnic table, calloused fingers picking meat out of a lobster shell, when he spots her across the crowd. She’s laughing so hard at a story the bait shop owner’s telling her that she snorts, clapping a hand over her mouth, copper streaks in her dark hair catching the golden late afternoon sun. She’s wearing a faded red flannel tied around her waist, a threadbare linen tank, and scuffed white sneakers, bare calves dusted with sand from walking the beach before the event. She glances over, catches him staring, and holds eye contact for a full two beats longer than casual politeness requires, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a half-smile before she looks back down at her paper plate.
Rafe looks away fast, takes a long sip of his beer, tells himself he’s being an idiot. He hasn’t flirted with anyone since 2015, hasn’t wanted to. But then she’s walking over, paper plate piled high with corn and coleslaw in one hand, a plastic cup of hard cider in the other, and she stops right next to his table, close enough that he can smell jasmine perfume mixed with salt on her skin. “You’re the guy who restored that Evinrude in the raffle, right?” she says, nodding toward the display by the auction tent. “My dad had the exact same one when I was a kid. We used to take it out on the pond behind our house every weekend. I bought three raffle tickets, just for a shot at it.”
She reaches across the table for a stack of napkins an inch from his elbow, and her bare forearm brushes his, warm through the thin cotton of his gray work shirt. The contact makes him jump a little, and he’s equal parts annoyed at his own jumpiness and hungry for more of that small, warm pressure. He hasn’t been touched for any reason that isn’t a handshake or a clap on the back from a fellow firefighter in years. He tells himself to keep the conversation short, polite, to go back to his lobster and stop acting like a teenager with a crush. But then he says, “Rafe. Rafe Oliveira. And yeah, that one took me three months. Had to track down a carburetor from a guy in New Hampshire.” “Clara,” she says, grinning, and holds out her hand. Her palm is soft, but there’s a callus on the tip of her index finger from turning book pages, she tells him, she’s the new part-time librarian at the town’s tiny public library, moved up from Boston three months prior.
The raffle gets called ten minutes later, and Clara doesn’t win. She throws her head back and laughs, loud and unselfconscious, when the fire chief calls a retired fisherman’s name instead. “Knew my luck was garbage,” she says, sipping her cider. Rafe’s brain short circuits for a second, against every rule he’s set for himself over the last eight years, and the words are out of his mouth before he can stop them. “I got a half-restored 1964 Evinrude in my shop. Same family as the raffle one. If you want to come by sometime, I can show you how to work on it. No charge.”
She leans in a little, so their shoulders are almost touching, and he can smell butter and cider on her breath. She doesn’t tease him, doesn’t act like it’s a silly offer. “You asking me to get grease under my nails with you, Rafe?” she says, soft, like it’s a secret just for him. He nods, his throat tight, and adds, “Only if you bring that cider you’re drinking. I got a cooler out back of the shop, we can crack them open when we take a break.” She gives him her number scrawled on a napkin from the picnic table, waves, and walks off to talk to a group of teachers from the local elementary school.
Rafe leaves the clambake half an hour later, the napkin folded carefully in the pocket of his work pants, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t unlock his shop when he gets home just to mess with motors. He spends 20 minutes sweeping the sawdust and grease off the workbench by the front window, and digs a clean set of work gloves out of a storage bin in the back. She shows up the next Saturday at 2pm, six pack of the same hard cider in one hand, a pair of well-worn leather work gloves tucked in the back pocket of her jeans. She walks over to where he’s got the 1964 Evinrude propped up on the workbench, brushes a fleck of sawdust off the shoulder of his flannel, her fingers lingering on his upper arm for half a second before she pulls away. He hands her a chrome wrench, and they both lean in over the motor, the clink of metal against metal mixing with the sound of gulls crying over the bay.
