Milo Rourke, 61, makes his living restoring vintage outboard motors out of the cinder block workshop behind his lake cabin in northern Minnesota. He’s got a scar slashing across his left eyebrow from a 2019 job where a 1960 Johnson backfired into his face, and a bad habit of assuming anyone who strikes up an unplanned conversation with him wants either a free motor tune-up or to borrow his pickup to haul garbage to the dump. He’s not a hermit, exactly, but he’s kept every person at arm’s length since his wife left him for a traveling snowmobile salesman 12 years prior, convinced letting anyone close is just asking for a headache he doesn’t have the patience for.
He’s at the VFW’s weekly walleye fry the last Friday in July, picking breading off the edge of his plate and ignoring the row of retirees yelling over a pool game, when a woman slides into the booth across from him without asking. He’s half ready to tell her the seat’s taken before he recognizes her: Lila Mae Carter, his old next door neighbor’s niece, who used to spend two weeks every summer up here when she was a kid, trailing after him while he worked on motors, asking a hundred questions about carburetors and spark plugs. She’s 44 now, he remembers, because he’d seen a Facebook post from her aunt about her birthday back in May, and she’s in town to help gut her aunt’s basement, which took three feet of water during the flash floods two weeks prior. There’s still a smudge of dark mud streaked across her left cheek, a raw cut on her knuckle, and she’s wearing a faded Iron Range hockey hoodie that’s a size too big, sleeves rolled up to her elbows.
He doesn’t know what to say first, so he just nods, and she grins, the same gap between her two front teeth he remembers from when she was 17 and tried to convince him to let her take his old fishing boat out alone. She orders a Coors Light from the passing waitress, leans back against the booth, and starts teasing him about the time she accidentally dropped a socket into his 1957 Evinrude and he spent three hours fishing it out, pretending to be mad the whole time but sneaking her a root beer float when he was done. He laughs before he can stop himself, a rough, rusty sound he doesn’t hear too often, and when she reaches across the table to pass him the bottle of tartar sauce he’d been reaching for, their fingers brush for half a second. He feels a jolt run up his arm, hot and sharp, and he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned, immediately ashamed. He knew her when she was still in high school, for Christ’s sake, he shouldn’t be feeling that kind of pull, shouldn’t be noticing how the light from the neon beer sign hits the flecks of gold in her green eyes, how she smells like lavender laundry soap and pine cleaner, sharp and warm all at once.
She doesn’t seem to notice his reaction, just keeps talking, telling him about the mess in her aunt’s basement, how they found a box of old summer photos half submerged, most of them with him in the background, covered in motor grease. She leans forward then, elbows on the table, and her knee brushes his under the booth, solid and warm, and he doesn’t move his leg away. She holds his eye contact for three full beats, longer than she has to, and he can smell the vanilla lip balm she’s wearing, the faint coffee on her breath, and the shame fades a little, replaced by something lighter, giddier, like he’s 19 again sneaking a girl into the back of his dad’s pickup after a county fair.
She mentions the 1957 Evinrude her aunt had stored down in the basement, half submerged in the flood, says she wants to fix it up herself, sell it to pay for her aunt’s new water heater. She asks if he’d be willing to teach her, says she’ll pay him in peach pie and whatever beer he wants, no free labor guilt attached. She says it like she can read his mind, like she knows he hates feeling used, and that’s the thing that breaks through the last of his resistance. He nods before he can overthink it, says he’ll bring his toolbox over to her aunt’s place at 10 the next morning.
She grins again, finishes her beer, and stands up, slinging her canvas work bag over her shoulder. She waves as she walks out the door, and he sits there for another ten minutes, picking at the rest of his walleye, before he notices she left her red plaid flannel shirt draped over the back of the booth. He picks it up, holds it for a second, and the fabric still holds her scent, lavender and pine and the faint tang of motor grease she must have picked up rummaging through her aunt’s old tools. He tucks it into the passenger seat of his pickup when he leaves, already making a mental list of the parts they’ll need for the Evinrude, and he doesn’t even feel the usual twist of cynical dread in his chest when he thinks about seeing her the next day.
