Manny Rocha, 62, retired wildland fire crew supervisor, had only showed up to the coastal town’s annual seafood festival because his next door neighbor left a free general admission ticket tucked under his truck’s windshield wiper that morning. He’d spent the last eight years sticking to a rigid, solitary routine: wake at 5 a.m., work on his 1978 Ford F-150 restoration for three hours, eat a tuna sandwich for lunch, drop by the library once a week to pick up nonfiction about old fire crews, and stop at the dive bar for one draft beer every Friday before heading home. He hated crowds, hated the way the town’s regulars gossiped about the “quiet widower who never talks to anyone,” and had almost crumpled the ticket up and tossed it in the trash before he remembered the stand that sold grilled oysters with habanero butter only set up once a year for the festival.
He was three spots from the front of the oyster line when the sky split open. Rain came down in hard, cold sheets, soaking through his flannel shirt in 10 seconds flat, sending the crowd scrambling for whatever cover they could find. The woman two spots ahead of him stumbled back, her rain boot catching on a loose tent stake, and slammed into his chest before he could step out of the way. He grabbed her elbow to steady her, his calloused, scarred fingers (leftover from a 2014 blaze outside Bend that put him in the burn unit for two weeks) brushing the soft, sun-warmed skin of her forearm. He recognized her immediately: Elara, the 58-year-old county librarian who’d tracked down three out-of-print wildfire memoirs for him the month prior, the one with silver hoops set with tiny fire opals he’d stared at for half a second before looking away, embarrassed.
She mumbled an apology, swiping rain off her forehead, and they both ducked under the nearest awning, a tattered vinyl thing strung between two food trucks that was barely big enough for the two of them. Their sides pressed together from shoulder to hip, the rough wool of her navy cardigan scratching lightly through his wet shirt, and he could smell jasmine lotion and sea salt in her hair, mixed with the briny scent of oysters and fried calamari drifting from the food trucks. He tensed up at first, convinced every pair of eyes in the crowd was on them, that by Monday the diner regulars would be whispering about how Manny Rocha was finally “getting over his wife” like it was some kind of spectator sport. The guilt hit sharp, hot, for even noticing how the silver strands in her dark hair caught the faint light from the food truck’s neon sign, for liking the way her laugh was low and scratchy, like she smoked the occasional menthol on her lunch break.
They ran through the rain, his hand light on the small of her back to guide her around puddles, and by the time they got to his truck they were both soaked to the bone, their shoes squelching when they climbed into the cab, which still held the faint warmth from three hours of sitting in the sun. He handed her a cold can of IPA, their fingers brushing when she took it, and she held eye contact with him for three full beats, longer than was strictly polite, before she popped the top and took a sip. He’d spent eight years convincing himself any kind of new connection was a betrayal of his wife, that he was too old, too set in his ways, too broken to enjoy anything that didn’t involve his truck or his books, but sitting there next to her, listening to her joke about the library’s book club that only read romance novels set in lighthouses, the guilt faded slow, replaced by a giddy, quiet thrill he hadn’t felt since he was 17 and sneaking his high school girlfriend into the drive-in.
They sat in the cab for an hour, splitting the order of oysters, passing the can of IPA back and forth when hers ran out, while the rain tapped soft and steady on the truck roof. She told him she’d moved to the town two years prior, after her husband died of a sudden heart attack, that she’d taken the librarian job to get away from the noise of Portland, to be close to the ocean. He showed her the photo album he kept in the glove compartment of his fire crew days, the dents he’d fixed on his truck so far, and she asked if he could teach her how to change the oil in her beat-up old Honda Civic, which had been giving her trouble for months. When the rain stopped, the sun peeked out, painting the sky pink and tangerine over the ocean, and he walked her to her car parked three spots down. She leaned in before she climbed in, pressing a soft, warm kiss to his rain-damp cheek, and he could taste the faint sweetness of cherry lip balm on his skin when she pulled away. She scribbled her phone number on the back of the crumpled oyster order receipt and pressed it into his palm, said she’d see him next Tuesday when he came to return those memoirs. He stood there until her car turned the corner out of sight, the receipt crumpled tight in his hand, his beer still half full in the other. He tucked the receipt into the inner pocket of his flannel, already counting down the days until next Tuesday.
