Moe Petrakis, 59, spends 40 hours a week hunched over a workbench in his coastal Oregon bungalow, restoring vintage fishing reels for commercial guides and wealthy weekend anglers. He’s got a scar splitting his left eyebrow from a 2007 seiner collision, a habit of leaving half-empty coffee mugs on every flat surface of his house, and a 12-year grudge against Lila Marquez, the woman who’d reported his unpermitted 3-foot dock extension to the county back in 2012, costing him $1200 in fines and a whole lot of public embarrassment at the town hall meeting that followed. His wife, Ellie, had teased him for weeks about picking a fight with a 26-year-old fresh out of environmental science grad school, but even after Ellie passed from ovarian cancer two years later, the grudge stuck. He’d avoided the annual Newport Seafood & Wine Festival every year since, until his old deckhand Jerry showed up at his door at 11 a.m. Saturday, shoved a festival wristband in his hand, and threatened to donate all Moe’s rare Penn reel collection to the local high school fishing team if he didn’t come.
He was three IPAs deep, leaning against a pop-up beer tent railing watching a crab shucking contest, when he turned to grab a salted pretzel from the food stand next to him and slammed right into someone holding a cup of oaked chardonnay. Half his beer sloshed over the rim, leaving a faint golden stain blooming over the left breast of a cream linen button-down. He started to grumble an apology, looked up, and it was Lila. She’s 38 now, dark hair pulled back in a loose braid, a tiny silver anchor tattoo peeking out behind her left ear, sun freckles dusting the bridge of her nose. She laughed, low and warm, not the sharp, condescending snort he’d replayed in his head a hundred times since the town hall. “Of course it’s you, Moe Petrakis,” she said, dabbing at the stain with a crumpled napkin pulled from her jeans pocket. “I swear you’ve been aiming that beer at me for a decade.”
He was flustered, grabbed a handful of napkins from the stack on the beer tent counter, reached out to help, and his knuckle brushed the soft, sun-warmed skin of her forearm. She didn’t flinch. She smelled like brine and coconut sunscreen, the exact same scent Ellie used to wear on day trips out to the offshore halibut grounds. He mumbled that he’d pay for the shirt, and she waved him off, said it was an $8 thrifted find she only wore to festivals where people spilled food and drink on each other constantly. They ended up stepping away from the crowd, leaning against the weathered wooden railing of the harbor dock, seagulls crying overhead, the low thrum of a cover band playing Johnny Cash drifting from the main stage. She told him she’s now the county’s marine conservation coordinator, spent the last three years pushing to waive permit fees for retired fishermen who want to build small, personal dock extensions, no red tape, no fines. She said she tried to slip a note under his door two years prior to tell him, but he’d yelled through the wood that he wasn’t buying whatever she was selling, so she’d left.
He felt stupid, suddenly, the grudge he’d carried for 12 years feeling silly, weightless. She asked what he’d been up to, and he told her about the reel restoration business, showed her a photo on his phone of a 1972 Penn Senator he’d been working on for six months, polishing the brass spool by hand, replacing every worn part with original vintage stock. Her eyes lit up. She said her grandpa was a seiner out of Astoria, she used to take apart his old reels in his garage when she was 10, still had his first Penn tucked in the closet of her tiny beach cottage. The wind picked up off the ocean, a group of teens chasing each other with water guns ran past, and she stepped closer to him to avoid getting sprayed, her hip brushing his denim-clad thigh. She held eye contact for two full beats longer than was strictly polite, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a half-smile that felt equal parts teasing and warm.
She asked if he wanted to head back to his place, so she could see that Senator in person, maybe bring her grandpa’s reel by next week so he could look at it. He hesitated for half a second, the old irritation flaring for just a split second before it faded, replaced by a slow, warm buzz he hadn’t felt since Ellie was alive. He nodded, said he had a cooler of cold IPA in the back of his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150, they could stop for fried clams at the roadside stand on the way.
They walked through the festival crowd together, his shoulder brushing hers every few steps, no awkward forced space between them. When they got to his bungalow, he led her back to the workshop, flipped on the overhead fluorescent light, and she leaned against the edge of his scarred workbench, picking up the half-restored Senator, running her thumb over the polished brass spool like she was handling something precious. She glanced up at him, said she used to sit on the public dock across from his house when she was a teen, watching him work on his boat, thought he was the grumpiest, most handsome guy on the whole coast. He stepped closer to her, reached out, tapped the tiny anchor tattoo behind her ear with the tip of his index finger, and she shivered a little, leaning into his touch.
