Ronan O’Malley, 53, custom fishing rod builder out of a converted boathouse on Maine’s Penobscot Bay, had only agreed to man the local conservation group’s booth at the annual seafood festival to pay back a friend who’d bailed him out of a broken boat motor bind three months prior. He hated crowded events, hated the forced small talk, hated the way half the town still side-eyed him eight years after his wife left him for a wind farm engineer from Portland. His worst flaw, he’d admit if pressed, was that he’d built a fortress around himself so thick he couldn’t remember the last time he’d let anyone new past the first layer of grumpy, gear-obsessed small talk.
The first sign his day was going off script was when the woman running the adjacent wild blueberry jam booth leaned over the rickety pine divider, her sun-bleached auburn hair falling over one shoulder, and asked if he had an extra roll of packing tape. He looked up, and his throat went dry. It was Lila Marlow, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one who’d always snuck him extra slices of key lime pie at family holidays, who’d laughed so hard at his terrible fishing jokes at their 2012 camping trip she’d snort-laughed sparkling wine out her nose. He hadn’t seen her in a decade, not since she’d moved to Alaska to work on a crab boat. She smelled like wild blueberry and coconut sunscreen, the thick kind that sticks to your skin and smells like unplanned summer vacation.
He handed her the tape, and their fingers brushed. Her skin was warm, calloused at the fingertips from picking berries, and he felt a jolt shoot up his arm that had nothing to do with the static from the wool blanket he’d been sitting on. She held eye contact for three beats too long, a lazy smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth, and said she’d heard he was still holed up in that boathouse like a reclusive bear who only came out to chase off trespassers on his favorite fishing spots.
His first instinct was to bristle, to make an excuse and turn back to his stack of conservation pamphlets. Messing with his ex’s family was the kind of small town taboo that would get people gossiping over diner pancakes for six months, and he’d spent years avoiding exactly that kind of drama. But then she held up a jar of jam, the label hand-drawn with a little sketch of a blueberry bush, and said she’d trade him a full case for a custom rod for her teenage son, who’d just gotten into shore fishing. He found himself saying yes before he could think better of it.
They talked through the rest of the afternoon, over the noise of the steel drum band playing by the lobster bake tent, over the shouts of kids chasing seagulls that kept stealing fried clam strips off paper plates. The air smelled like salt and butter and grilled corn, and the sun warmed the back of his neck through his faded flannel shirt, unbuttoned over a well-worn white undershirt. She told him she’d moved back to Maine six months prior, after her own divorce, that she’d bought a 10 acre blueberry farm 20 minutes up the coast, that she’d missed the cold Atlantic water more than she’d missed anything else in the world. He told her about the 42 pound striper he’d caught last spring, about the custom rod he’d built for a 12 year old kid with cerebral palsy that had won the youth state fishing tournament last month. He didn’t realize until the festival organizers started blowing whistles to signal closing time that he hadn’t checked his phone once in four hours, hadn’t thought once about the order he was supposed to finish when he got back to the shop.
Dusk was settling in, pink and orange streaking the sky over the bay, when a soft summer rain started falling, light enough that it just made the pavement glisten. Lila said her truck had died that morning, that she’d called a friend who’d bailed on picking her up, and he offered her a ride in his beat up 2008 Ford F150 without hesitation. On the drive up the coast, he pulled over at the scenic overlook he’d stopped at a hundred times alone, the one where you could see all the way out to the island where he’d proposed to his ex 18 years prior. He grabbed a tarp from the bed of the truck, a cold IPA he’d stashed under the seat, and the jar of blueberry jam she’d handed him earlier, and they climbed into the back, huddling under the tarp to stay out of the rain.
She took a spoonful of jam straight from the jar, held it out to him, and when he leaned in to take it, she kissed him, slow and soft, the taste of blueberry and mint gum on her lips. For half a second he tensed up, every alarm in his head blaring about bad ideas, about gossip, about the mess he’d have to clean up if this went wrong. Then he kissed her back, his hand resting light on her hip, the sound of the rain hitting the tarp and the waves crashing on the rocks below drowning out every last one of those stupid, overcautious thoughts.
They stayed there for 20 minutes, kissing like teenagers who thought they had all the time in the world, until the rain picked up enough that the tarp started leaking on his shoulder. He drove her to her cottage, the one with the blue porch swing she’d posted about on Instagram a month prior, the one he’d accidentally clicked on and stared at for 10 minutes before closing the app, embarrassed at himself. When he walked her to the door, she twisted the doorknob, looked up at him through rain-damp eyelashes, and asked if he wanted to come in for a pot of coffee and whatever leftover blueberry scones she had in the fridge. He didn’t hesitate this time, stepping over the threshold behind her, the door clicking shut softly behind them.
