Ronan O’Malley swipes sweat off his forehead with the back of a grease-stained work glove, the mesquite ash stuck to his wrist smudging a gray streak across his sunburnt skin. It’s 92 degrees at the Astoria summer street fair, the air thick with the smell of fried funnel cake, salt off the Columbia River, and the hickory smoke curling off the sample trays at his smoked salmon booth. The line stretches 15 people deep, most of them out-of-state tourists in cargo shorts asking dumb questions about “wild vs farmed” like he hasn’t heard the same line 400 times this weekend. He’s 62, spent 34 years gillnetting salmon on the river before a storm blew out his left knee, and he’s got zero patience for performative “sustainability” takes from people who can’t tell a coho from a chinook.
He doesn’t notice the woman at the adjacent pottery booth until she slides a cold lemon seltzer across the two-foot gap between their tables, the can sweating so much it leaves a dark ring on his wooden counter. His hand brushes hers when he grabs it, and he pauses—her knuckles are calloused, ridged with thin white scars from clay shards, cool from holding the can for ten minutes before she passed it over. He looks up, and recognizes her immediately. Lena Marquez. His ex-wife Elise’s first cousin. 58, elementary school art teacher, the only person who didn’t pick Elise’s side when she left 11 years prior, who sent him a short text two weeks after the divorce papers were signed saying Elise was an idiot for walking away from someone who showed up every single day. He hasn’t seen her in 12 years.
She’s got streaks of silver in her dark brown hair, pulled back in a loose braid, flecks of blue glaze on her forearm, and she smirks when she catches him staring at the ash on his jaw. He swipes at his face with his glove, misses the spot entirely, and she laughs, low and warm, leaning over the gap between their booths. Her wrist brushes his stubble when she swipes the ash off with her thumb, and he can smell lavender lotion and dry kiln dust on her, sharp and sweet under the fair’s greasy scent. He freezes for half a second, half the desire to lean into the touch, half the urge to step back, to avoid the gossip he knows will spread if anyone sees them being too friendly. Small coastal towns run on that kind of drama, and he’s spent a decade making sure he’s not the topic of diner booth chatter.
They chat in lulls between customers, him handing out cedar-smoked salmon samples, her wrapping mugs for tourists who pay $40 for a hand-thrown piece etched with salmon or lighthouses. She tells him she moved back to the coast last year, after her husband died of a sudden heart attack mid-hike, that she’d been teaching art in Salem for 22 years and got sick of the rain without the ocean’s salt tang to cut it. She teases him about the crudely printed sign he’s got taped to his booth that says “NO I WILL NOT EXPLAIN WHY FARMED SALMON IS TRASH TO YOU FOR THE 10TH TIME TODAY” and he finds himself laughing, a real laugh, not the half-assed customer service grin he’s been wearing all weekend. A kid on a scooter knocks over a stack of her mug boxes, and he leaves his booth with his teen employee manning the register, kneeling down next to her to pick up the unbroken mugs. Their shoulders press together when they reach for the same box, the linen of her shirt thin enough that he can feel the heat of her skin through the fabric, and she doesn’t shift away, just glances up at him, her dark eyes crinkling at the corners.
By 8pm the fair is winding down, the pink and orange sunset bleeding over the river, seagulls circling the trash cans for leftover funnel cake and half-eaten corn dogs. He’s packing his coolers into the back of his beat-up Ford F-150 when she walks over, holding two mugs in her hands. One is etched with a leaping coho, the other with a messy, splotched paintbrush. She says she threw them a week ago, when she saw his name on the fair vendor list, that they’re for him if he wants them. He hesitates, his throat tight, thinking about the old ladies at the Main Street diner who will whisper about him hooking up with his ex-wife’s cousin, thinking about how scared he is to let someone get close enough to leave him again. The sharp, uncomfortable burn of self-preservation war with the warm pull of desire, the quiet comfort he’s felt all day talking to her, the way she didn’t treat him like a broken, lonely old man the way most people in town do.
He takes the mugs, his fingers wrapping around hers where she’s holding the handle of the salmon one, and asks her if she wants to come back to his place. He says he’s got a bottle of rye he’s been saving for no good reason, and leftover salmon patties his sister dropped off that morning, that the smokehouse out back stays cool even when the rest of the house is sweltering. She nods, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and says she’d like that, as long as he doesn’t make her wash dishes after. He opens the passenger door of his truck for her, waits until she’s settled in before he climbs into the driver’s seat. She rests her hand on his forearm when he turns the key in the ignition, her calloused fingers light on the sunburnt skin, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away. The radio flickers on to an old Johnny Cash deep cut, and he pulls out of the fair parking lot, heading for the wood-smoke scented cottage on the edge of town he’s lived in alone for 11 years.
