Rafe Ortega, 53, makes custom boat canvas for a living, his forearms crisscrossed with tiny, silvery needle pricks from three decades of pushing heavy Sunbrella fabric through industrial sewing machines. He’s avoided the annual Apalachicola Seafood Festival for six years, ever since his ex-wife showed up with her new yacht broker boyfriend and made a scene about him forgetting their kid’s soccer practice, but this year the marina was so packed with spring break renters begging for last-minute Bimini top repairs that he bailed early, grabbed a cold draft and a plate of grilled oysters, and claimed a half-empty picnic table at the far edge of the crowd.
He’s halfway through his third beer when someone drops a plate of gator tail across from him, and he looks up to see Clara Bennett, the city code enforcement officer who’s taped three bright orange violation notices to his boathouse door in the last month. She’s not in her usual crisp navy uniform and sensible loafers, either—she’s wearing cutoff jean shorts that show a faint scar on her left knee, a faded Jimmy Buffett tee with a hole at the collar, and beat-up white sneakers caked with mud. “Don’t look so excited,” she says, smirking as she pops the tab on a seltzer. “Figured the only table not swarming with drunk tourists would be the one occupied by the guy who thinks city ordinances don’t apply to boathouses.”
Rafe scoffs, pushing the jar of hot sauce across the table. Their fingers brush when she grabs it, and he notices her nails are chipped with pale blue paint, not the polished neutral she wore when she handed him the last violation notice two weeks prior. He’s spent weeks resenting her, writing her off as a stuck-up transplant who didn’t care that the “unpermitted awning” she was nagging him about was the only shade for the retired commercial fishermen who stopped by his shop every morning to drink coffee and complain about new outboard motors. But up close, she smells like coconut sunscreen and the faint, briny smoke of the oyster grills, and when she snorts laughing at his story about a client who tried to pay him in live crabs for a custom cover for his pet alligator, he feels the edge of his irritation melt.
A light drizzle picks up out of nowhere, and the crowd scrambles for cover, people grabbing coolers and folding chairs as the sky darkens. She says her truck is parked a half mile away, by the public boat ramp, and he offers her a ride on the beat-up golf cart he uses to haul canvas around the marina. The rain picks up by the time they get back to his boathouse, fat, cold drops stinging his cheeks, and he holds the door open for her, offering a frayed cotton towel to dry off her arms.
He nods at the wooden awning strung between the boathouse and the adjacent dock, the one she’s been threatening to fine him over. “Built that after Michael,” he says, kicking a loose nail on the floor. “The old guys who fish off the dock don’t have anywhere else to get out of the sun. Didn’t feel like jumping through 12 hoops at city hall just to do something nice.” She studies it for a minute, running a hand along the rough cedar support beam, and softens, saying she can walk him through filing a retroactive permit tomorrow, no fines, no hassle, just a 15 minute online form.
She turns to face him, standing so close he can feel the heat radiating off her damp shirt, and reaches up to brush a stray piece of white canvas thread off the shoulder of his flannel shirt, her hand lingering on his chest for a beat longer than necessary. He doesn’t pull away. He’d spent eight years closing himself off, convincing himself that any new connection was just going to bring more drama, more headaches, more people telling him what he can and can’t do with the space he’d built for himself. But for the first time in years, that doesn’t feel like a bad tradeoff.
They sit on the beat-up leather couch he keeps in the back of the shop, listening to the rain pound against the metal roof, and she tells him she moved to Apalachicola from Atlanta last year, after her divorce, took the code enforcement job because she was sick of sitting in a cubicle 10 hours a day, sick of never seeing the sun. The rain slows, and a sliver of pink and orange sunset peeks through the clouds, painting the gulf bright tangerine. She leans her head on his shoulder, and he wraps his arm around her waist, his calloused hand resting lightly on the soft fabric of her shorts. He reaches for his phone on the coffee table to pull up the permit application, his thumb brushing the back of her hand where it rests on his thigh.
