Manny Ruiz, 53, makes custom fishing rods for a living out of the two-car garage of his coastal Oregon cottage. He’s got a scar across his right palm from a 30-pound salmon that pulled his line tight enough to slice through leather work gloves, and a rule he’s stuck to for eight years, ever since his wife died of breast cancer: no unnecessary small talk, no casual dates, no letting anyone new stick around long enough to leave a mark. His friends rib him for being a hermit, but he likes the quiet, the rhythm of wrapping graphite blanks in iridescent thread, the way the work doesn’t ask anything of him he doesn’t want to give.
He’s at the annual Neah Bay Seafood Festival only because his best friend Jake begged him to drop off a custom rod for the youth fishing program raffle, and he’s already counting the minutes until he can get back to his garage. He’s leaning against a weathered cedar fence sipping an IPA that’s cold enough to make his fingertips tingle, when he spots her across the beer tent. Clara Voss. He’d know her anywhere, sat three rows behind her at the fisheries board hearing last month where her husband, the regional manager, fined Jake $1200 for going three pounds over his Dungeness crab quota. He’s got every reason to scowl, turn around, leave before she sees him.
But she’s already walking over, bare feet in leather sandals, linen button-down tied at the waist, auburn hair streaked with sunbleached highlights, a tiny scar slicing through the left edge of her eyebrow. She smells like coconut sunscreen and grilled garlic butter shrimp when she stops a foot away, close enough that he can see the gold flecks in her hazel eyes, the smudge of crab butter on the side of her thumb. She points at the Manny’s Custom Rods patch stitched to the front of his hoodie, and her arm brushes his when she leans in, her knuckle grazing the fabric of his shirt for half a beat longer than necessary.
He’s ready to snap at her, tell her to go back to her rule-following husband, when she laughs, soft and low, and says she’s been trying to track him down for weeks. Her older brother is a tournament angler out of Astoria, she explains, and he’s been begging for a Manny Ruiz original for his 50th birthday. When he grunts and mentions Jake’s fine, her smile softens. She’d argued with her husband for two hours after that hearing, she says, got him to cut the fine in half, didn’t even tell Jake because she didn’t want the town gossip tying it to her. She’s been separated from him for three months, she adds, quiet enough that only he can hear, hasn’t told anyone but her mom, didn’t want the whole town picking sides.
He doesn’t overthink it. He leans down, kisses her, and she tastes like citrus seltzer and fried calamari, her hand coming up to curl around the back of his neck, fingers tangling in the gray strands of hair at his nape. They pull apart when a group of kids runs past, yelling, chasing a seagull that stole a french fry from one of their paper trays. She grins, tucks a strand of windblown hair behind her ear, and says she’s got a cooler of cold pinot gris back at her rental cottage a block away, plus a folder full of photos of her brother’s old beat-up rod so he can get a sense of what he likes.
He nods, doesn’t even hesitate, grabs his half-finished IPA from where he set it on the rail, falls into step next to her. Their hands brush every other step as they walk down the boardwalk, the sound of the ocean rising to wrap around them, and he doesn’t feel the usual urge to run, to shut down, to go back to his quiet empty house.
