Elias Voss, 51, makes his living rebuilding vintage outboard motors out of a cinder block shop tucked between a bait shop and a laundromat on the edge of Minnesota’s Leech Lake. He’s spent the last eight years avoiding anything that feels like vulnerability, ever since his wife left him for a Minneapolis real estate agent who wore loafers without socks and couldn’t tell a spark plug from a fishing hook. His worst flaw, the one he won’t admit even to himself, is that he cares far too much what the gossips at the weekly town fish fry say about him, even as he pretends their side-eye doesn’t land.
He shows up to the Friday fry straight from the shop, jeans smudged with gear oil, a streak of graphite on his left jaw, work boots still caked with lake mud. He’s halfway to the beer cooler when a woman’s arm brushes his ribs, soft and warm through his faded flannel, and he smells coconut sunscreen mixed with pine before he turns around. It’s Lila Marlow, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one he’s spent 10 years deliberately not looking too long at, the one who used to bring him homebrew when he was stuck on a tricky motor rebuild back when he was still married, the one who’s 12 years younger and has always been entirely off limits. She’s reaching past him for a black cherry seltzer, her tanned forearm dotted with freckles, and when she pulls back she holds his gaze, slow, like she knows exactly what she’s doing.
He freezes for half a second, half wanting to mumble an excuse and bolt to the other side of the picnic ground, half wanting to lean in closer. It’s wrong, he tells himself. Everyone here knows their connection, knows his ex still spends two weeks every summer at her family’s cabin up the shore. The gossips would have a field day, would call him a creep, would spin all kinds of garbage that would make the family Christmas dinner next month unbearable. But then she smirks, nods at the grease streak on his jeans, and says she saw his post on the town historical society page about the 1957 Evinrude he’s restoring for the lake museum, says she’s been dying to see it in person.
He finds himself leading her to an empty picnic table at the far edge of the grounds, away from the cluster of retirees yelling about fishing limits and the teen waitstaff hauling trays of fried cod and coleslaw. She steals a dill pickle off his paper plate before he even sits down, same as she did at that 2013 family Christmas where he caught her staring at him across the dinner table while his ex ranted about his messy shop. Her knuckle brushes his wrist when she reaches for the pickle jar a second time, and he feels a jolt go up his arm, sharp and warm, the kind he hasn’t felt since he was 19 and sneaking around with his high school girlfriend behind his parents’ back.
They talk for two hours, the crowd thinning out around them, the sun dipping low enough to paint the lake pink and tangerine. She tells him she’s moving to Oregon next week to take a forest ranger job in the Willamette National Forest, says she’s been ready to leave this small town behind ever since her logger husband died in a tree fall three years prior. He tells her about the motor rebuild, about the way the old Evinrude sputters for 10 minutes before it turns over, about how he’s been sleeping on the couch in his shop three nights a week because the house feels too quiet. He doesn’t mean to say that last part, it slips out before he can stop it, and she nods like she gets it, like she knows what it feels like to be surrounded by empty space that used to hold someone else.
When the last of the fry staff locks up the food stand, she asks if he wants to walk down to the shore. He doesn’t hesitate. The gravel crunches under their boots, crickets chirp loud in the tall grass, and he can hear the soft lap of lake water against the sand 10 feet away. She stops when they reach the edge of the dock, turns to face him, and she’s so close he can see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes, can feel the heat of her body against his. He kisses her first, no overthinking, no worrying about what the gossips will say, no guilt about his ex-wife. She tastes like cherry seltzer and dill pickle, her hand comes up to rest on the side of his neck, her thumb brushing the graphite smudge on his jaw.
They spend the next three days together, puttering around his shop testing the Evinrude, taking his old aluminum fishing boat out at dawn to catch walleye, eating frozen pepperoni pizza on his back porch while they watch the sun set. He doesn’t tell anyone where he is, doesn’t check the town Facebook group, doesn’t worry about who might see them. On the third morning, he drives her to the airport in Duluth, helps her haul her duffel bag of hiking gear to the security line. She hands him a crumpled polaroid of the two of them at that 2013 Christmas, her grinning while he holds up a half-assembled carburetor, and scribbles her new Portland phone number on the back in bright blue marker, tells him to come visit as soon as he finishes the Evinrude.
He watches her walk through the security checkpoint, waits until she turns around and waves once before he turns to head back to his truck. He pulls the polaroid out of his flannel pocket as he walks, taps the phone number on the back with his thumb, already pulling up flight schedules to Portland on his phone before he even opens the truck door.
