Elroy Rios, 62, spent 31 years commercial fishing Lake Superior before a slip on black ice shredded the cartilage in his left knee and forced him into semi-retirement. These days he runs a tiny smoked fish side hustle out of his backyard smokehouse, sells whitefish and lake trout jerky at the weekly Duluth farmers market, and avoids all local community events like they’re contagious. His ex-wife left him for a retired high school football coach eight years prior, and he’d grown sick of the pitying side glances, the uninvited offers to fix his fence or bring him casseroles, the way every woman his age seemed to size him up as a half-broken project to rehabilitate. He only agreed to come to the July street dance because his 16-year-old granddaughter begged him, said she was manning the 4-H bake stand and needed him to be the first to try her prize peach pie.
He’d been leaning against the side of a cheese curd truck for 20 minutes, nursing a root beer and weighing how fast he could limp to his truck without hurting his granddaughter’s feelings, when a woman carrying two corn dogs tripped over a crack in the asphalt and stumbled into his side. Yellow mustard splattered across the front of his faded red flannel, the kind he only wore to public events to signal he was not open to conversation. She yelped, fumbling in her jeans pocket for a crumpled napkin, and stepped so close to him he could smell lavender hand lotion mixed with the roasted corn on her breath before he even got a good look at her.
It was Marnie Hale, the new city librarian who’d moved to town from Chicago six months prior, the one who’d left three handwritten notes in his market bag inviting him to the senior book club’s outdoor reading series. He’d ignored every single one, figured she was just another well-meaning busybody who wanted him to talk about how hard it was being alone. Her gray bob had sun-streaked blonde strands sticking up at the crown, she was wearing a faded 1977 Fleetwood Mac tour tee and scuffed work boots, and she was laughing so hard at her own clumsiness her eyes crinkled shut at the corners. She dabbed at the mustard stain with the napkin, her knuckles brushing his chest through the flannel, and he froze up like he’d just grabbed a live wire.
He started to tell her it was fine, he didn’t care about the stain, but she cut him off before he could get the words out, teasing him for dodging her invites for three months straight. She said she’d found a box of old Lake Superior fishing memoirs in the library’s basement archives, knew he was the only guy in town who’d actually lived half the stories in the books, and she wasn’t going to take no for an answer this time. The band behind them struck up a rough, twangy cover of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” the asphalt still thrumming with leftover heat from the 82-degree day, and for the first time in years, he didn’t feel the urge to run.
He snapped back at her, teasing that he only talked fishing with people who didn’t flinch at lake slime on their shoes, and she held up calloused fingertips, worn rough from turning hundreds of book pages a week, and said she’d scrubbed worse off her hands working her way through college washing dishes at a rib joint. She grabbed his wrist to pull him toward a picnic table off the edge of the dance floor, her palm cool against his sun-warmed skin, and he didn’t pull away, even when his knee twinged as he followed. She pulled up photos of the memoir collection on her phone, leaning in so close her shoulder pressed against his, and he found himself telling her the story of the 42-pound lake trout he’d caught 12 miles off shore in 2009, the one he’d refused to let the local paper photograph because he hated the attention.
He didn’t even realize he was smiling until she pointed it out, grinning like she’d caught him stealing a cookie off the counter. He surprised himself by asking her out on his small fishing boat the following Saturday, said he’d take her to the spot where he caught that trout, they could smoke fish on the back deck when they got back, but only if she stopped hounding him about the book club until after the trip. She leaned in even closer, her lips almost brushing his ear so he could hear her over the music, and said she’d agree only if he brought that smoked trout jerky he sold at the market, and promised not to make her bait her own hook.
His granddaughter walked over a minute later, holding a paper plate with a thick slice of peach pie still warm from the oven, and raised her eyebrows at him like she knew exactly what was going on. Marnie took the first bite, making a dramatic, over-the-top face like it was the best thing she’d ever tasted, and passed the fork to Elroy without even asking if he wanted a bite. Their fingers brushed when he took the fork from her, that same little electric jolt shooting up his arm, and he took a bite, the sweet, juicy peach mixing with the buttery crust and the faint lavender smell drifting off her hair, the wind off the lake cool against the back of his neck.
He didn’t even remember he’d been planning to leave 45 minutes earlier.
