Elias Voss, 52, makes his living restoring vintage fishing reels out of a clapboard workshop behind his coastal Oregon cottage, and he hasn’t willingly let a new person disrupt his routine in 8 years. The routine is non-negotiable: up at 6 to check tide charts, 8 hours of cleaning, polishing, and rebuilding rusted Penns and Pfluegers shipped in from collectors across the country, a single bourbon on the rocks every Wednesday night at The Salty Spur’s trivia night, home by 10. His flaw, if you ask the few people who still talk to him, is that he’s convinced any deviation from that script will unravel the quiet peace he built after his wife packed her bags for a Portland tech job and never looked back.
The rain lashing the bar’s fogged windows on this particular Wednesday is heavy enough to drown out the jukebox’s old Johnny Cash tracks, and Elias is half paying attention to the trivia host when the front door swings open. The mayor’s wife steps in first, shaking rain off an oilskin trench coat, and Elias’s jaw tightens. He’d seen the mayor’s press release two days prior, threatening to crack down on unlicensed home businesses, a category that includes his reel restoration gig. He’d written 17 angry drafts of an email in response, deleted every single one, and decided he’d rather close up shop than kiss some smug small-town politician’s ass.
She slides onto the stool two spots away from him, boots caked with mud, a faded flannel thrown over a thin silk camisole, forest green nail polish chipped at the edges. She doesn’t join the mayor’s group huddled at the far end of the bar, just flags the bartender for a cider, and when she glances over and catches Elias staring, she smirks. “He ranted about you for 45 minutes last night,” she says, loud enough for only him to hear, nodding at her husband. “Called you ‘that stubborn reel guy’ who refuses to fill out a permit application.”
Elias snorts, takes a sip of bourbon. He’s halfway to a snarky retort when the trivia host calls out a question about 1972 Penn Spinfisher model numbers, and the whole bar goes quiet. She leans over before he can register what’s happening, taps his forearm lightly, her palm warm even through the thick flannel of his shirt. “Tell me the answer,” she whispers, breath smelling like cinnamon gum and crisp fall air. “My team’s 3 points down, I’ll buy you a shot of whatever you want.”
He hesitates. He doesn’t talk to strangers, doesn’t take favors from people connected to the guy who could shut down his life’s work. But she’s got a crinkle at the corner of her eye that feels familiar, like the girls he used to take fishing back in high school, before the weight of adulthood turned him into a hermit. He whispers the model number, she calls it out, her team cheers, and she slides a shot of rye across the bar to him 30 seconds later.
They talk for the next hour, ignoring the rest of the bar. She says she moved to town from Seattle 6 months prior, married the mayor on a whim after a 3 month long-distance fling, and already regrets it. Hates the stuffy campaign dinners, hates that he cares more about currying favor with the county commission than asking her how her day was, hates that he hasn’t so much as asked about the tree farm she’s been trying to start on the empty lot behind their house. When she reaches for the bowl of salted peanuts between their stools, her arm brushes his, and Elias has to shift on his stool to hide the way his body reacts to the small, accidental contact. She leans in to make fun of her husband’s terrible trivia answers, her shoulder pressed to his, and the lavender and pine scent of her shampoo wraps around him like something he didn’t know he’d been missing.
The mayor leaves early for a last minute campaign event, yelling a half-hearted goodbye over his shoulder, and she turns to Elias, eyebrow raised. “My car’s parked by the boat ramp, two blocks from your workshop,” she says. “Walk me? I’ve always wanted to see how you fix those reels.”
He agrees before he can talk himself out of it. They huddle under his worn oilskin jacket for the walk, rain soaking the cuffs of his jeans, her arm wrapped tight around his waist to stay close. The workshop smells like machine oil and cedar shavings when he unlocks the door, and she runs a finger along the shelf of fully restored reels lined up by the window, quiet for a long minute. When she turns to face him, she’s so close he can count the freckles across her nose, and she rests her hand flat on his chest, right over the fast thud of his heart. “I know this is a terrible idea,” she says, so quiet he can barely hear her over the hum of the space heater. “But I haven’t felt this seen by anyone in years.”
He kisses her slow, tastes the rye and cherry lip balm on her mouth, and she tangles her fingers in the graying hair at the nape of his neck, like she’s been waiting to do it all night. An hour later, she’s pulling her boots on by the door, and he hands her a small, fully restored minnow reel he’d fixed up earlier that month for a neighbor’s kid. “For your nephew,” he says, remembering she’d mentioned he’d just started fishing with his dad. She kisses him on the cheek, says she’s filing for divorce first thing Monday morning, and asks if he’d be willing to teach her how to restore reels on weekends, if he’s not too busy hiding from the world.
He walks her to her car, watches her taillights fade down the rain-slicked road, then pulls out his phone and deletes all 17 drafts of the angry emails he’d written to the mayor. He leans against the streetlamp outside his workshop, pulls the half-full flask of bourbon out of his jacket pocket, and takes a slow sip, the corner of his mouth tugging up into a smile he hasn’t worn in nearly a decade.
