Rafe Mendez, 62, retired commercial salmon fishing captain, had avoided the annual Pacific City Lions Club crab feed for seven straight years. He’d skipped every potluck, parade, and town fundraiser his ex-wife Karen volunteered for, stubborn enough to cut out half the town’s social calendar just to avoid awkward small talk and sympathetic side eyes after their messy 2016 divorce. He only showed up that drizzly March night because his 18-year-old godson Javi was being awarded a marine biology scholarship, and Rafe had promised he’d be there. He wore the same faded Carhartt jacket he’d had since his last season fishing the Bering Sea, scuffed work boots caked with mud from his cabin’s driveway, and a baseball cap pulled low enough to hide the gray streaks at his temples. The metal pole barn reeked of Old Bay, steamed Dungeness crab, and cheap light beer, the hum of 200 conversing voices loud enough to rattle the corrugated metal walls.
He’d grabbed a bottle of IPA from the drink table and was edging toward the back of the room, intent on standing in the corner until Javi’s speech was over, when he turned too fast and knocked straight into someone carrying a paper plate piled high with crab legs. Beer sloshed over the rim of his bottle, splattering the front of the woman’s deep green silk blouse. He started sputtering apologies, grabbing a handful of napkins from the stack by the food table, before he looked up and recognized her. Lena Voss, Karen’s first cousin, the quiet kid who’d sat in the back of their wedding reception reading a poetry book instead of dancing, now 48, with streaks of auburn in her dark hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose that he still remembered. She laughed, a low, warm sound, and waved off his apologies, dabbing at the beer stain with a napkin. “Relax, Rafe. This thing was thrifted. I’ve spilled way worse on way nicer clothes.” She was standing close enough that he could smell jasmine hand lotion and the butter from the crab cracker she’d been eating, her elbow brushing his bicep every time someone squeezed past them in the crowded aisle.
He tensed up first, instinct telling him to excuse himself and bolt, the part of him that’d spent seven years avoiding anyone tied to Karen screaming that this was a terrible idea. Everyone in town knew Karen still talked about him like he was a deadbeat who’d left her high and dry, even though she’d been the one who ran off with a life insurance salesman from Portland. Hooking up with her cousin would be the kind of gossip that’d keep the town’s coffee shops chattering for six months, and a part of him was disgusted at the thought of giving Karen even more ammo to talk trash about him. But Lena didn’t mention Karen once, not in the first 10 minutes of conversation, not when he mentioned he lived out in the cabin on the north end of the bay that he’d built with his dad in the 90s, not when he told her he spent most days now building scale models of the fishing boats he used to run. She told him she was a traveling rare book restorer, in town for three weeks fixing a collection of 1920s nautical logs the historical society had dug up out of a storage closet. She held his gaze when she talked, no polite darting away, no awkward pauses, and when she laughed at his dumb joke about the time he caught a 30-pound halibut off his dock last summer, her hand rested on his forearm for three full seconds, warm through the thick fabric of his jacket.
They snuck out the back door 40 minutes later, after Javi’s speech, when no one was looking, the cold rain hitting his neck the second they stepped under the awning. The noise of the crab feed faded behind them, replaced by the soft crash of waves on the nearby shore and the patter of rain on the awning’s plastic. She leaned back against the cinder block wall, tucking her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket, and smiled up at him. “I had a crush on you, you know,” she said, no preamble, no shyness. “When I was 19. Came to Karen’s family barbecue, saw you carry three 50-pound crab pots off the back of your truck like they weighed nothing. Thought you were the toughest guy I’d ever met. Couldn’t believe she got to marry you.” Rafe froze for half a second, the conflict he’d been pushing down all night flaring up again, anger at Karen, embarrassment at the idea of letting himself want something this easy, this good, warring with the warm hum in his chest he hadn’t felt in a decade. But then she reached up, brushing a stray strand of rain-soaked hair off his forehead, her fingers cool against his skin, and he didn’t pull away. He’d spent seven years punishing himself for a divorce that wasn’t even his fault, cutting himself off from anything that could make him happy just to avoid a little gossip. He was tired of being stubborn. Tired of being alone.
They drove back to his cabin in his beat up 2008 Ford F-150, the heat blowing warm air through the cab, rain streaking the windshield. He made hot toddies with bourbon he kept stashed under the kitchen sink, and she wandered around his living room, running her fingers over the scale model boats he had lined up on the mantel, asking him about every one. When she turned back to him, holding the mug he’d handed her, he crossed the room and kissed her slow, the taste of bourbon and cinnamon on her lips, the sound of waves hitting the dock outside the only noise in the quiet cabin. He tilted his head to deepen the kiss, one hand resting lightly on her waist, as the rain tapped steady against the cabin’s kitchen window.
