Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 38 years hauling salmon out of the Bering Sea before a blown rotator cuff forced him into early retirement. His only personality flaw, if you asked his daughter, was that he’d turned stubbornness into a full-time hobby: he’d turned down every dinner invitation, every community mixer, every “friend of a friend” blind date in the seven years since his wife passed, convinced he’d already used up his allotment of good company in this life. He’d only showed up to the Astoria fire department’s summer barbecue that Saturday because his 10-year-old granddaughter was manning the lemonade stand, and he’d never been able to say no to that kid’s pigtails and gap-toothed grin.
He was leaning against a splintered pine picnic table, nursing a can of cheap lager and half-watching a group of kids chase each other through a sprinkler, when he turned to wave at his granddaughter mid-sip. His elbow knocked the can half off the table, and warm, foamy beer sloshed down the front of the woman standing next to him, soaking the hem of her cream linen skirt. He cursed under his breath, yanking a handful of crumpled napkins from the dispenser on the table, and leaned down to dab at the mess before he thought better of it. His knuckles brushed the soft skin of her upper thigh, and he froze, expecting her to flinch, to snap at him for being a careless old fool.
She didn’t. She laughed, a low, warm sound that cut through the noise of the crowd and the crackle of the charcoal grills. He looked up, and their eyes locked for three full beats, no one looking away. She was around his age, silver streaks running through her wavy chestnut hair, freckles across her nose, a smudge of blue ink on the side of her thumb like she’d been scribbling notes earlier. She smelled like lavender laundry detergent and old paper, the same scent his wife used to have when she’d come home from the bookstore with a bag of new paperbacks. He felt a jolt low in his chest, the kind he hadn’t felt since he was 19 and asking his first girlfriend out to a drive-in movie, and he immediately hated himself for it. Disgust warred with that stupid, flickering desire: he was too old for this, too set in his ways, too much of a widower to be noticing how her smile crinkled the corners of her hazel eyes.
“Relax,” she said, and her hand landed on his left forearm, right over the thick, pale scar he’d gotten from a winch accident back in 2012. Her palm was soft, just a little calloused at the fingertips, and she didn’t pull away for a full two seconds. “The skirt was $3 at the thrift store down on Marine Drive. I was already looking for an excuse to toss it anyway.”
He apologized three more times anyway, offered to buy her a new beer, offered to buy her dinner to make up for it, before he realized he was rambling. She told him her name was Clara, she’d moved to Astoria six months prior to take a part-time job at the downtown library after her divorce from a corporate lawyer who’d spent 25 years caring more about his golf handicap than he cared about her. They stood there talking for 45 minutes, their shoulders brushing every time someone walked past them to get to the food table, close enough that he could smell the vanilla ice cream cone she was eating on her breath. She told him the library had a beat-up old brass ship’s clock in the adult reading nook that hadn’t worked since the 90s, no one could figure out how to fix it, and he lit up, telling her he restored old nautical equipment as a hobby, had a whole workbench in his garage full of gears and springs and old clock faces.
He was so caught up in telling her about the 1940s chronometer he’d fixed for the maritime museum earlier that year that he almost didn’t notice her leaning in, her voice dropping a little like she was sharing a secret. “They’re playing Double Indemnity at the little waterfront theater tonight,” she said, nodding toward the pier a few blocks away, where the marquee was lit up even in the daytime. “I was gonna go alone, but I’d rather have company. If you’re not busy.”
For half a second, every instinct he had screamed no. He’d not stepped foot in that theater since his wife died, they’d gone there every month for date night, he’d thought the place was off-limits forever. He thought about the empty house he went home to every night, the way his workbench was the only thing that kept him busy after 7 PM, the way her hand was resting on the picnic table two inches from his, her nails painted a soft coral, chipped at the edges like she painted them herself while she read. He said yes before he could talk himself out of it.
They met at the theater an hour before the show, bought a large bucket of buttered popcorn to split, sat in the back row like they were teenagers sneaking in to an R-rated movie. Halfway through the film, when Fred MacMurray was plotting how to kill Barbara Stanwyck’s husband for the insurance payout, her hand slid across the armrest between them, her fingers brushing his first before she laced them through his. His hand was calloused, scarred, rough from decades of hauling nets and turning wrenches and twisting clock gears, and he wrapped it around hers tight, no hesitation, no guilt creeping in for the first time in years.
He turned his head just enough to catch the faint glow of the silver screen on her cheek, and for the first time in seven years, he didn’t feel guilty for smiling.
