Rafe Mendez, 57, has mended commercial fishing trawl nets out of his cinder block Astoria workshop for 31 years, ever since his dad handed him the heavy waxed thread and bone fid the day he graduated high school. He’s stubborn to a fault, has turned down every invite to cookouts, fundraisers, and setups his buddies have pushed his way for 12 years, ever since his ex-wife loaded her moving truck and told him he loved patching holes in nets more than patching holes in their marriage. He only shows up to the coast guard auxiliary fish fry because his childhood friend Mike threatened to leave a dead Dungeness crab on his workshop porch if he bailed again.
He leans against a splintered pine picnic table, cold IPA in one hand, the other picking at a stray fish scale stuck to the cuff of his oil-stained flannel, and calculates he can slip out in eight minutes flat, no one will notice. The air smells like fried cod, burnt hushpuppies, and salt pine off the nearby woods, a country cover band slurring their way through a 90s Alan Jackson track off to the side, kids screaming as a seagull snatches a corn dog right out of a toddler’s hand. He’s just about to push off the table when a woman trips over the cooler cord at his feet, half a plate of hushpuppies tipping onto his work boot and the front of his shirt.
She’s flustered immediately, rambling apologies, leaning in to brush crumbs off his chest before she even thinks twice. Her forearm brushes the bare skin of his wrist where his flannel is rolled up, and he catches a whiff of lavender hand lotion and vanilla lip balm, sharp and sweet against the greasy fried food smell hanging over the park. His first instinct is to step back, snap that it’s fine and leave, but he freezes when he looks down at her, notices the thin white scar wrapping around her left wrist, exactly like the one his older sister got when she got caught in a winch on their dad’s boat when they were teens. She’s got hazel eyes crinkled at the corners from laughing at her own clumsiness, wears a faded flannel shirt of her own and scuffed work boots, not the fancy city shoes he’d heard the new librarian was wearing when she moved to town two weeks prior.
He grunts instead of snapping, tells her it’s no big deal, he’s had worse spilled on him than hushpuppies. She stays, leans against the picnic table next to him, close enough her shoulder brushes his every time a gust of wind blows off the ocean, and introduces herself as Lena, the new part-time librarian. He finds himself telling her about the net mending business, how he can fix a 10-foot tear in a trawl net in under two hours, how he likes the repetition of the work, the satisfaction of taking something busted and making it strong again. He doesn’t mention the divorce, doesn’t mention how he hasn’t let anyone sit in his workshop for longer than 15 minutes in years, but she asks questions anyway, doesn’t check her phone once, holds eye contact so steady he has to look away every few seconds like he’s staring straight into the sun.
He’s heard the old timers at the bait shop gossiping about her, saying she’s a city girl from Portland, just passing through, that any local guy who wastes his time chasing her is an idiot. He’s also heard the same guys call him a hermit, a lost cause, too set in his ways to ever let anyone in, so when she asks if he wants to walk down to the pier once the fundraiser wraps up, the sun dipping low over the water painting the sky pink and tangerine, he almost says no out of habit. Then he sees her twist the thin silver ring on her index finger, nervous, and he nods before he can overthink it.
The pier planks creak under their boots, salt spray stinging his cheeks a little, seagulls settling on the pilings for the night, quiet now that the kids are gone. They stop at the end, leaning against the weathered rail, and she tells him she moved to the coast after her mom died, sick of the noise and the crowds in Portland, wanted to be somewhere she could hear the ocean when she woke up. He doesn’t say anything for a minute, then reaches out, brushes a strand of windblown brown hair off her face, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her cheek. He expects her to pull back, to call him weird, but she leans into the touch, her hand coming up to rest on his wrist, her thumb brushing the small scar he has there from a net hook cut a few years back.
They stay there for almost an hour, talking about nothing and everything, occasionally brushing hands when they point out a seal bobbing in the waves or a fishing boat heading back to the harbor. When they walk back to the parking lot, the streetlights just flickering on, he asks if she wants to come by his workshop the next morning, he’ll make bad coffee, show her how he uses the fid to weave the net thread. She grins, says she’d like that a lot, brings her hand up to squeeze his arm for half a second before she climbs into her beat up green Subaru.
He stands in the parking lot long after her taillights disappear around the corner, the cold ocean wind cutting through his flannel, and realizes he hasn’t looked forward to the next day in longer than he can remember. He kicks at a loose piece of gravel on the asphalt, grinning so wide his cheeks ache, before unlocking his rusted 1998 Ford F-150 and climbing behind the wheel.
