Ronan O’Malley, 62, retired commercial salmon fishing deck boss and part-time bait and tackle shop owner, hefted the 40-pound cooler of smoked sockeye down the Astoria street fair sidewalk, salt air stinging the sunburn on his forearms. He’d avoided the fair for three years running, but the Elks lodge needed the donated salmon for their fundraiser, and he owed the guys a favor after they helped him re-roof his garage last winter. The crowd was thick with kids chasing cotton candy vendors, retirees in lawn chairs listening to the bluegrass band near the food court, and pop-up vendors hawking everything from hand-carved cutting boards to pickled asparagus. He was half watching a toddler face-plant into a snow cone when his hip knocked a wobbly stack of paperbacks off a folding table.
The woman behind the table caught the top stack before they hit the mud, her elbow brushing his wrist as she moved. Mara, he realized—she’d moved into the pale blue cottage two doors down from him three months prior, ran a traveling used bookstore pop-up, spent most evenings hauling boxes of books in and out of her pickup while her calico cat sat on the porch rail. She was 58, he’d learned from a neighbor, moved from Portland to take care of her mom who was in a memory care facility a half hour out of town. She wiped her hand on her well-worn flannel shirt, hazel eyes crinkling at the corners as she gestured to the cooler in his arms. “You gonna drop that next, or do I need to get out of the blast zone?”
He laughed, a rough, rusty sound he didn’t make often these days, and helped her restack the books, mostly hardboiled detective novels and vintage fishing memoirs. When their hands brushed reaching for the same tattered copy of *The Deep Blue Good-by*, he felt the thin callus on her index finger, worn smooth from decades of turning book pages, and he pulled his hand back like he’d touched a hot stove. The internal alarm he’d kept blaring for 12 years went off immediately—his late wife’s best friend had cornered him at the lodge Christmas party last year, told him any man who moved on less than a decade after his wife died was a selfish bastard, and he’d believed her, up until that second. He told himself he was being an idiot, that he was too old for this, that casual flirting would only end in disappointment, but he didn’t leave.
He bought the Travis McGee novel, paid her twice the asking price even when she tried to argue, and carried the cooler the rest of the way to the Elks booth, his skin still buzzing where her hand had touched his. An hour later, once he’d helped the guys set up the fryer and passed out a few sample bites of salmon, he wandered back to her booth. She was eating a paper plate of fried onion rings, crumbs stuck to the corner of her mouth, and she waved him over, holding out the plate. He took one, the grease crispy on his fingers, and listened as she complained that every kayak launch she’d tried on the Columbia was either crowded with jet skiers or choked with driftwood. He knew every hidden, quiet launch within 20 miles, had fished those spots for 30 years, but the words stuck in his throat for a minute, like he was admitting to something forbidden.
When he finally told her about the small cove launch 10 minutes upriver, hidden behind a stand of Douglas firs, she lit up, leaning in close enough that he could smell lavender lotion, old paper, and the faint tang of IPA on her breath. “You gonna show me where it is, or do I have to guess?” she asked, her knee brushing his where they stood next to the table. He almost made an excuse, almost said he had to restock minnows at the shop the next day, but then she reached up to wipe a smudge of salmon seasoning off his jaw, her thumb brushing his skin for half a second, and he found himself saying yes.
They closed up her booth together when the fair ended at 8, loaded her boxes of books into her beat-up Ford F-150, then walked to the beer garden near the band stage, grabbing two cold IPAs from the food truck. The sun was dipping low over the Columbia, painting the sky pink and tangerine, and the bluegrass band was playing a slow, twangy cover of a Johnny Cash song. They sat on a splintered picnic table at the edge of the crowd, their knees touching under the table the whole time, neither of them moving away. He told her about the 12 years he’d spent alone, about the guilt he’d carried for even thinking about going out with someone, about his wife leaving him three years before she died, about the friend who’d made him feel like he had to grieve forever to be a good person. She told him about her ex husband leaving her for a 28-year-old yoga instructor, about how she’d sworn off dating entirely until she moved to Astoria, about how he seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn’t flake if she needed help pulling her kayak off a sandbar.
When they finished their beers, he walked her to her truck, and she pulled a thin paperback of fishing poetry out of her bag, handing it to him as a thank you for the launch tip. She leaned in first, kissing him soft on the cheek, then on the mouth, slow, tasting like beer and cherry hard candy, and he wrapped one arm around her waist, careful like she might pull away, but she leaned into him, her hands fisting in the front of his flannel shirt. They made plans to meet at the cove at 7 a.m. the next day, coffee and breakfast burritos in tow, and she waved as she pulled out of the parking lot.
When he got home, his old hound dog greeted him at the door, tail thumping against the wall, and he set the two books on the kitchen counter next to his fishing license. He filled the hound’s food bowl, grabbed his phone to text his wife’s old friend that he wouldn’t be at the monthly widower potluck the next weekend, then set his alarm for 6:15 a.m. without a single second of hesitation.
