Rafe Marino is 61, spent 38 years running a one-man offset print shop in Akron, Ohio, until he sold the place last spring for enough cash to pay off his house and finish restoring the 1972 F-100 his dad left him. His biggest flaw is he still holds a grudge against his ex-wife Linda, who left him 10 years prior for a yoga instructor who wore toe shoes to grocery runs, so he’s sworn off dating entirely, convinced every woman his age is either looking for a free handyman or a check to fund their cruise hobby. He spends most Friday nights at the local VFW’s fish fry, sitting at the same Formica table by the jukebox, drinking frosty mugs of Pabst and eating battered cod so greasy it seeps through two layers of paper plate.
The room smells like fried oil, Old Spice, and the sawdust they scatter on the floor when someone spills a beer. He’s halfway through his second mug, picking at a pile of crinkle cut fries, when a shadow falls over his table. He looks up, and for half a second he doesn’t recognize her, until she smiles, the same little dimple in her left cheek he remembers from his wedding 32 years prior. It’s Clara, Linda’s younger cousin. She’s 48 now, moved back to town three months prior to take care of her mom, who’s recovering from a stroke. She pulls out the chair across from him without asking, and when she sits, her denim-clad knee brushes his under the table, warm and solid, and he freezes for half a beat. She doesn’t apologize, just leans forward a little, her elbow brushing the edge of his plate, and says she heard he sold the print shop.
He doesn’t want to talk to her, at first. She’s Linda’s family, that’s a line he’s never crossed, never even thought about crossing. But she smells like lavender lotion and the lemon she squeezed over her own order of cod, and she laughs at his dumb story about the old Heidelberg press that used to eat 10 envelopes a day whenever it rained, loud enough that a couple of the guys at the next table glance over. When she reaches across the table to grab the bottle of white vinegar, her hand brushes his, and he feels the rough callus on her index finger, the same kind he has on his hands from sanding the F-100’s body panels. She doesn’t yank her hand away, just holds it there for a full two seconds, her dark eyes holding his, before she picks up the bottle and douses her fries.
She tells him she remembers coming by his print shop when she was 20, getting flyers printed for the animal rescue she ran out of her college apartment, how he didn’t charge her because she brought him a tin of her mom’s chocolate chip cookies as payment. He’d forgotten that entirely, forgotten how she’d hung around the shop for an hour that day, asking him questions about how the presses worked, while Linda was off at a hair appointment. He’d thought she was cute back then, too, but she was barely out of her teens, he was married to Linda, so he’d pushed the thought down so far he forgot it existed.
The VFW empties out slow, the old guys heading home to their recliners and their wives, the bartender wiping down the counter with a rag that looks older than Rafe. It’s drizzling outside when they leave, the asphalt smelling like wet cement and pine from the trees lining the parking lot. He offers to walk her to her car, just to be polite, even though every alarm in his head is blaring that this is a bad idea, that Linda will hear about it, that everyone in town will talk. Her Subaru is parked at the far end of the lot, the back seat full of dog crates and bags of dog food for the rescue she still runs out of her mom’s garage.
She stops at the driver’s side door, turns to him, and the rain is beading in her hair, dripping down the side of her neck. She says she always had a crush on him back then, thought he was the only grown up who didn’t treat her like a silly kid who didn’t know what she was doing. He hesitates, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his work jacket, and for a second he thinks about walking away, about going home to his empty house and his half-restored truck and the grudge he’s carried for 10 years. But then she steps closer, so close he can feel the heat coming off her, and she doesn’t pull away when he leans in, when he kisses her, soft at first, then harder when her hand comes up to the back of his neck, her fingers tangling in the gray hair at his nape. She tastes like lemonade and mint gum, the rain cool against her cheek where his thumb brushes it.
He pulls back first, mumbles that they shouldn’t do this, that it’s messy, that Linda will lose her mind if she finds out. She laughs, loud and bright, and leans against the car door, says Linda left him for a guy who brings his own kale smoothies to family cookouts, who the hell cares what she thinks? It hits him then, so hard he almost laughs himself, that he’s spent 10 years letting Linda’s choices dictate his own, that he’s been so scared of what other people will think he hasn’t let himself be happy for longer than 10 minutes at a time.
They make plans to go to the old drive-in west of town the next weekend, the one that’s playing a double feature of 70s Clint Eastwood westerns, and she promises to bring her mom’s chocolate chip cookies, the same ones she brought him all those years ago. He gets in his F-100, turns the key, the engine sputtering once before it roars to life, the radio cutting on to Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” before he can change the station. He taps his work boot in time with the drum line, the cool rain spattering against the windshield, and doesn’t spare a single glance for the crumpled photo of his ex he’d tucked in the sun visor three years prior.
