Manny Ruiz is 59, makes his living restoring antique maps out of the cramped ground floor of his Annapolis row house, and hasn’t accepted a social invite in eight years, not since his wife’s car slid off an icy Route 50 on her way home from a book club. His only consistent human contact is the mail carrier and the occasional stuffy collector dropping off water-damaged 17th century navigation charts, and he likes it that way—no small talk, no expectations, no chance of letting someone get close enough to leave a hole when they’re gone. His biggest flaw, if you ask his next door neighbor Linda, is that he acts like he’s already buried the part of himself that gets to have fun. That’s why she all but carried him to the annual neighborhood crab feast that Saturday, even when he complained he had a $12,000 map restoration due for a wealthy local collector in three weeks.
The air reeked of Old Bay, warm beer, and charred corn on the cob. Plastic folding tables stuck to bare forearms, crab crunched under work boots, and a terrible cover band played Jimmy Buffett off by the playground, the lead singer slurring the words to “Margaritaville” like he’d already had three too many. Manny parked himself at the far end of a half-empty table, wore a faded 2014 Orioles postseason tee dotted with archival glue stains, picked at a crab leg like it owed him money, and planned to sneak out within 45 minutes.
That plan went out the window when she sat down next to him. She was 48, had sun-streaked brown hair pulled back in a messy braid, wore cutoff jean shorts and a sailboat-themed tank top, and her bare upper arm brushed his when she reached for a stack of paper napkins. He recognized her immediately: she was Clara Bennett, the daughter of his new client, the same woman her father had explicitly forbidden him from speaking to when he dropped off the map two weeks prior. “She’s just after the family heirlooms to sell them for quick cash,” the old man had grumbled, “you so much as let her step foot in your shop, I pull the entire contract, no questions asked.” Manny needed that money to fix the leaky roof over his work studio, had been putting it off for two years, so he’d nodded and agreed.
Clara leaned in, and her knee brushed his under the table, warm through the thin denim of his jeans. “You’re the map guy, right? The one my dad’s paying way too much to fix Grandma’s Chesapeake chart?” Her voice was low, amused, and she smelled like coconut sunscreen and citrus seltzer. He tensed up, glanced over his shoulder to make sure her dad wasn’t anywhere nearby, then nodded once. She laughed, a low, throaty sound that made the back of his neck feel hot. “Relax, he’s at his bridge club, won’t be here till the feast is almost over. I just want to talk to someone who doesn’t think I’m a gold digger for wanting to see the map that Grandma promised me before she died.”
He shouldn’t engage. He knew that. But she kept leaning in, closer every time they talked, so he could see the tiny flecks of green in her hazel eyes, the faint scar on her left wrist from a sailing accident when she was 16, the way her lip curled up when she made fun of her dad’s terrible taste in cashmere sweaters. She pointed at the indigo ink stains on his fingers, said they looked like tiny constellations, and he found himself laughing, a real laugh, not the polite half-chuckle he reserved for stuffy clients. He told her about the work he was doing on the map, how there was a smudged handwritten note scrawled in the margin from her grandma to her grandpa when they were dating, and her face softened, like she was about to cry.
She brushed a fleck of Old Bay off his cheek then, her thumb lingering on his skin for half a second longer than it needed to, and his breath caught. “Will you let me see it tonight?” she asked, quiet enough that no one else at the table could hear. “My dad’s going to be at bridge till 10. I won’t touch anything, I just want to read that note.”
He hesitated for three full seconds, thought about the roof, the contract, the rule he’d kept for eight years of not letting anyone into his shop after hours, not even close friends. Then he nodded.
They walked back to his row house as the sun dipped below the Severn River, fireflies blinking in the oak trees lining the street, Clara swinging a half-empty can of Natty Boh in one hand. When he got to his front door, he fumbled with his keys for a second, his hands shaking a little, and she laughed, soft, next to him. He unlocked the shop door, held it open, and she stepped inside, her shoulder pressing warm against his chest for a beat longer than necessary, and he realized he hadn’t felt that tight, bright spark of anticipation in his stomach since the last time his wife had surprised him with opening day tickets, eight years prior.
