Elwood “Woody” Rainer, 62, retired telephone line installer, had planned to spend the coastal community oyster roast holed up by the beer cooler until his 12-year-old granddaughter was ready to leave. He’d spent 38 years climbing utility poles across rural Ohio, his knees permanently stiff from winter ice, his left wrist crisscrossed with a thick scar from a 2007 fall that put him in the hospital for three weeks, and he’d never been much for small talk with strangers. His wife of 34 years had died of lung cancer eight years prior, and he’d avoided any situation that felt like it could lead to something more than polite chit-chat since, convinced even a casual coffee with another woman was a betrayal of the life they’d built. He’d moved to the Florida panhandle last year to be closer to his granddaughter, and most of his days were spent fixing vintage rotary phones for the local senior center, his calloused fingers wrapping around frayed cords the way he used to wrap around utility lines mid-climb.
The air reeked of smoked oysters and briny salt, crushed shells crunching under his scuffed work boots, a scratchy bluegrass trio playing from a portable speaker propped on a splintered picnic table. He’d just reached for the last cold IPA in the rolling cooler when another hand bumped his, cold from the ice, calloused at the knuckles, chipped clear nail polish dotted with tiny hand-painted fishhooks. He looked up, met the eyes of the woman everyone in town called Marnie, 58, owner of the bait and tackle shop down the road from his tiny bungalow. He’d heard the rumors, the old ladies at the senior center whispering that she’d left her rich orthodontist husband for a female fishing guide 12 years back, that she was “not the kind of person you wanted to be seen with if you cared what people thought.” For a split second, he almost pulled his hand away, the small-town conservative values he’d grown up with flaring sharp in his chest.
She held his gaze for a full two beats longer than polite, a half-smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth, and didn’t move her hand. “Thought I was the only person within 20 miles who didn’t think this stuff tastes like pine cleaner,” she said, nodding at the IPA. Her voice was rough, like she smoked a pack a day and spent most of her time yelling over outboard boat motors. She grabbed the beer, popped the top with the bottle opener on her fish-themed keychain, and passed it to him before grabbing the next slightly warm one for herself.
He took the beer, their fingers brushing again, and he didn’t pull away. They talked for 40 minutes, leaning against the side of the cooler, the crowd milling around them, her shoulder pressing light against his bicep every time someone squeezed past to grab a soda or a plate of oysters. He smelled coconut sunscreen and the faint tang of menthol cigarette smoke on her flannel shirt, nothing like the heavy rose perfume his wife used to wear to church, and he found himself leaning in closer when she talked, like he didn’t want to miss a word over the twang of the banjo. She teased him about the phone repair magnet on the back of his beat-up Ford F-150, said she had a 1983 wall-mounted rotary in the back of her tackle shop that hadn’t rung right in two years, that none of the local handymen knew what to do with a phone that didn’t connect to Wi-Fi.
The old voice in his head screamed that he should say no, that the gossips at the senior center would have a field day if they saw him pulling up to her shop alone, that he was too old for this kind of trouble, that he was betraying his wife even thinking about it. But she was looking at him like he actually knew something worth asking about, not like he was just some boring old widower who fixed phones for fun, and the cold beer was buzzing soft in his veins, and he found himself saying he could swing by tomorrow morning, take a look at it for free.
Her face lit up, and she grabbed a crumpled napkin from the picnic table next to them, scribbled her cell number on it with a purple crayon she pulled from her jacket pocket—she said she kept it for the kids that came into the shop to color while their parents bought bait—and pressed it into his palm. Her thumb brushed the scar on his left wrist as she did, slow, deliberate, not an accident. “I know a work scar when I see one,” she said, nodding at the raised line of white skin. “Got three of my own from fish hooks, one from a motorcycle crash back in ‘99.”
He curled his fingers around the napkin, the paper soft from being crumpled, the crayon wax still warm from her hand. He didn’t say anything, just nodded, and for the first time in eight years, he didn’t feel that sharp twist of guilt in his chest when he thought about spending time with someone new. She waved at him, said she’d leave the back door unlocked for him, and walked off to help a kid who’d spilled ketchup all over his dinosaur shirt.
He stood there for another five minutes, sipping his beer, watching her laugh when the kid wiped a ketchup-stained hand on her jeans, not even pretending to be mad. He tucked the napkin into the breast pocket of his worn gray flannel shirt, pressed it flat with his hand, and made a mental note to grab his multimeter and a pack of new rotary phone cords from his garage before he headed over the next morning.
