Moe Korzeniowski, 62, spent 34 years running a commercial salmon troller out of Astoria, Oregon before he sold the boat three years back, after a bad shoulder injury made hauling nets too painful. His biggest flaw, as his older sister never tired of telling him, was that he’d locked himself in a self-imposed state of mourning after his wife died of ovarian cancer eight years prior, turning down every blind date, every coffee invite, every chance at connection like it was a rotten fish someone tried to hand him at the docks. He’d agreed to come to the downtown summer street fair only because his niece begged him to help haul her ceramic pottery booth in at 6 a.m., and he could never say no to that kid.
He lingered by the food truck row at 2 p.m., a cold IPA in one hand, condensation dripping down his wrist onto his work jeans, a smoked salmon taco slathered with dill crema in the other, its crisp corn shell cracking at the edges. The air smelled like brine off the Columbia, fried funnel cake, and the faint diesel fumes of a fishing boat chugging downriver. A cover band two blocks over was slurring through a Tom Petty deep cut, the kind he and his wife used to blast on late night runs back from their fishing grounds. He’d been half ready to sneak out to his truck and go home to his garage, where he spent most days fixing old outboard motors for local kids, when he spotted the pop-up book booth ten feet away.
The woman running it was 58, he’d guess later, with silver streaks cutting through her chestnut bangs, a faded red flannel tied around her waist, and calluses on the tips of her fingers he spotted the second she reached up to tuck a stray hair behind her ear. She laughed at a toddler who’d grabbed a dinosaur bookmark off her display, handing it to the kid for free before turning back to restack a pile of poetry collections. He found himself walking over before he could talk himself out of it, work boots crunching on the sun-warmed asphalt dotted with dropped cotton candy fluff.
He pretended to browse the nature section, not really reading the spines, until she leaned in a foot away, close enough that he could smell lavender hand cream mixed with the cotton candy from the booth next door, and said she recognized him from photos his niece had shown her. She owned a used bookstore in the next town over, she said, and she’d heard he could fix almost any outboard motor made before 1990. When he nodded, not sure what to say, she reached for the dog-eared copy of Robert Frost he’d been staring at, and their knuckles brushed. He felt the rough ridge of a fresh paper cut on her index finger, and she didn’t yank her hand away, just held eye contact for a beat longer than was strictly polite, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a half-smile that felt like a private joke just for him.
His first instinct was to flinch, to make an excuse about needing to get back to the marina, to run from the quiet flutter in his chest that felt like he was 19 again, asking his wife out for their first milkshake at the drive-in. He hated that feeling half the time, hated that he still wanted something other than the quiet, empty routine he’d built for himself, like he was betraying the woman he’d spent 32 years married to. He almost said he had plans for the rest of the week, but she pointed to a scribbled margin note in the Frost book, leaning in so her shoulder brushed his sunburned bicep, and said the previous owner had written all their favorite coastal hiking spots in the margins, most of them trails he’d hiked with his wife back when they were first dating.
He bought the book for three dollars, and when he handed her the crumpled cash, she said she had a 1978 Boston Whaler her dad had left her sitting in her driveway, dead as a doornail, and asked if he’d be willing to take a look at it. She’d trade him a first edition copy of *The Perfect Storm* she’d had in climate-controlled storage for ten years, she said, plus a batch of the potato pierogies her Ukrainian grandma taught her to make, since she’d seen his last name and guessed he’d grown up eating the stuff.
He froze for three full seconds, every muscle in his body screaming to say no, to go back to his quiet house and his half-fixed 1986 Evinrude motor and the framed photos of his wife on his fridge. Then he looked at her, no pushy expectation in her hazel eyes, just a quiet, easy smile, and he realized he hadn’t had a home cooked meal that wasn’t frozen or from a food truck in almost six years. He said yes before the logical, guilt-ridden part of his brain could talk him out of it.
She wrote her number on the back of a salmon-illustrated bookmark, scrawling her name—Lila—underneath, and tucked it inside the front cover of the Frost book before handing it to him. He said he’d swing by her place Saturday morning, and she nodded, saying she’d have the pierogies fried and crispy with sour cream on the side by noon if he finished the motor early.
He walked back to his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150 an hour later, the book tucked under his arm, half a leftover taco in a grease-stained paper bag in his other hand, and the breeze off the river carried the sound of the band playing *Free Fallin’* as he unlocked the truck door. He pulled the bookmark out of the book once he sat down in the driver’s seat, running his thumb over the looping cursive of her phone number, and he didn’t feel the usual twist of guilt in his gut for the first time in eight years.
