Moe Sorrentino, 51, has spent the last seven years covered in two-stroke oil and grit, restoring vintage snowmobiles out of a cinder block shop 20 minutes outside Duluth. He’s avoided every local community event since his ex-wife packed her minivan and drove south for a guy who sold lake homes and wore pressed khakis every day, convinced half the town still whispers about it and the other half only talks to him out of pity. He only showed up to the fire department’s annual chili cook-off because his childhood buddy Ray, now the fire chief, showed up at his shop at 4 PM and threatened to tow his half-restored 1978 Ski-Doo Everest if he didn’t come.
He’s leaned against the bed of his beat-up 2006 Silverado, one hand curled around a paper bowl of three-alarm chili that’s already singed the tip of his tongue, the other wrapped around a can of cold Hamm’s, when she brushes past him. Her wool coat is forest green, just tight enough at the waist to catch his eye before he can look away, and her elbow grazes the bare skin of his bicep where his flannel sleeve is rolled up. She smells like cinnamon and pine soap, nothing like the exhaust and grease he’s surrounded by 12 hours a day, and he tenses up so fast he spills a drop of chili on his jeans.
“Sorry about that,” she says, turning around, and he recognizes her immediately: Clara, the new part-time librarian who moved to town three months prior, the one all the guys at the diner have been gossiping about, the one who used to work at a university press in Chicago and wears silk scarves even when she’s hauling boxes of books for the library’s fall sale. She’s holding a bowl of vegetarian chili in one hand, and her eye contact doesn’t waver, even when she glances down at the dark grease under his fingernails he forgot to scrub off before he left the shop. He mumbles an apology for being in the way, shifts to step further back, but she leans in instead, nodding at the faded snowmobile racing patch sewn to the chest of his flannel.
“Is that a 1975 Sno-Jet patch? My dad used to race those back in the 80s,” she says, and her shoulder brushes his when a group of teenaged firefighters runs past chasing a dog with a half-eaten cornbread muffin in its mouth. He can hear the lilt in her voice over the crackle of the fire pit and the chatter of the 40 or so people crowded around the folding tables, and for a second he can’t think of anything to say. He’s spent so long only talking to guys who care about carburetors and snowfall totals, he’s forgotten what it feels like to have a woman look at him like she’s actually interested in what he has to say, not just asking when he can fix her snowblower.
He fights the urge to make an excuse and leave, the voice in the back of his head hissing that she’s only talking to him to be nice, that she’d never actually want to hang around a guy who lives in a trailer next to his shop and hasn’t bought a new shirt in three years. But he finds himself talking anyway, telling her about the 1975 Sno-Jet he won his first state racing title on, about the 1978 Ski-Doo he’s rebuilding for a kid whose dad died in a logging accident last winter, about the way the trails up along the North Shore look at dawn in January, when the snow is untouched and the only sound is the hum of a snowmobile engine. She leans in the whole time, doesn’t check her phone, doesn’t glance over his shoulder at someone more interesting, and when he makes a dumb joke about how many times he’s crashed into a snowbank over the years she laughs so hard she snorts, then claps a hand over her mouth, her cheeks turning pink.
The drizzle starts 20 minutes later, fat cold drops that make the string lights strung between the fire station bay doors fizzle a little, and everyone starts packing up coolers and folding chairs. She groans, glancing down at her phone, and says her beat-up Honda Civic won’t start, it’s parked half a mile down the road by the library. He offers to jump it before he can talk himself out of it, and she grins, looping her arm through his like they’ve known each other for years as they walk down the dark, leaf-covered sidewalk.
He pops the hood of her Civic, sees the battery terminals are corroded, hooks the jumper cables up to his truck, and has it running in two minutes flat. He wipes his hands on the thigh of his jeans when he’s done, and before he can step back, she reaches up, brushes a smudge of battery grease off his cheek with the pad of her thumb. Her hand is warm, softer than anything he’s touched in years, and he freezes, doesn’t pull away, even when she lets her hand linger on his jaw for a beat.
“I asked the guys at the hardware store about you last week,” she says, like it’s no big deal, like she hasn’t been thinking about him too. “They said you can fix literally anything. I’ve got a 1960s record player that’s been broken for six months, and an apple pie I baked this morning that’s way too big for just me. You wanna come over later?”
The voice in his head tries to yell again, tells him he’s going to make an idiot of himself, that he doesn’t know anything about record players or pie or whatever fancy books she reads, but he shoves it down before it can take root. He nods, says he’d like that a lot, and she scribbles her address on the back of a library receipt for a collection of Jack Kerouac poems, tucks it into the pocket of his flannel.
She hugs him quick before she gets in her car, her face pressed to his chest for half a second, then drives off, waving out the window. He stands there for a minute, the rain dampening the collar of his flannel, the receipt crinkling in his pocket, and lifts a hand to his cheek, still feeling the tingle of her thumb against his skin. He pulls out his phone, texts Ray that he won’t be at the poker game that night, then climbs into his truck, turns the key, and heads toward the address scribbled on the receipt, the heater blowing warm air against his cold hands.
