Manny Ruiz is 62, spent 31 years as an air traffic controller at Phoenix Sky Harbor before retiring to a tiny clapboard cottage on Oregon’s coast three years back. His biggest flaw is he still plans every single hour of his day down to the minute, a habit he picked up after a 2012 near-midair he still blames on a split second of hesitation; he hasn’t done anything unplanned since his wife died of breast cancer eight years ago, even skips the annual neighborhood clam bake because he can never predict how long it’ll run. He’s at the Dockside Tavern’s weekly trivia night like he is every Thursday, tucked into the same booth he always claims 20 minutes early, when Jim, his usual trivia partner, texts him he’s bailing to deal with a broken water heater at his rental property. Manny’s half tempted to pack up his spiral notebook of 70s rock and 90s sports facts and head home when a woman slides into the booth across from him, setting a pint of IPA down hard enough to slosh foam over the rim.
It’s Lila, Jim’s ex-wife. They split six months prior, and Manny has heard every one of Jim’s rants about her: that she left him for a younger fisherman, drained half his savings for a beat-up 1978 Ford F-150, that she’s nothing but trouble. Manny has avoided her on principle for half a year, even crossing the street when he sees her coming out of the grocery store, because he doesn’t do drama, doesn’t do anything that could rattle the carefully curated calm of his retirement. He tenses, ready to tell her the booth is taken, when she nods at his notebook, smirks, and says “You got the Fleetwood Mac B-side question wrong last week. “Silver Springs” was the B-side to “Go Your Own Way,” not “Dreams.” The jukebox blares Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” the air smells like fried calamari and salt air, and her perfume is jasmine mixed with sharp citrus, like the lemon drops his wife used to keep in her purse.
He doesn’t kick her out. The bar is packed, every other booth and stool taken by local fishermen and weekend tourists, and he doesn’t have a good excuse anyway. They answer questions back and forth, her knocking out the 2000s rom-com answers he would have missed, him nailing the aviation and baseball trivia she stumbles on. When she reaches across the table to grab a fry off his plate, her wrist brushes his, and he flinches like he’s been burned; the scar across the soft inside of her wrist, from a motorcycle crash at 22, is rough under his skin for half a second before she pulls back, apologizes. He shakes his head, says it’s fine, doesn’t mention no one has touched him that wasn’t a doctor or grocery store cashier in over seven years.
When the bar gets loud after a group of tourists yells over a wrong answer, she slides out of her side of the booth and sits next to him, shoulder pressed to his, so she can hear him mutter the final jeopardy answer about 1980s space shuttle missions. He can feel the heat of her through his faded wool flannel, see flecks of gold in her dark brown eyes when she turns to grin at him, and he has to look away for a second, his face warm, a flutter in his chest he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager. He keeps waiting for the part where she asks him for something, where she proves all Jim’s rants right, but she doesn’t. She just laughs at his dumb joke about the FAA’s terrible dress code, splits a plate of mozzarella sticks with him, and calls the trivia host a cheap bastard when he docks them half a point for misspelling “Mickey Mantle.”
They win by three points, split the $120 cash prize down the middle. She tucks her $60 into the pocket of her worn jeans, nods at the door, and asks if he wants to walk down to the pier with her. Manny hesitates, glances at his watch, thinks about how he’s usually in bed by 9, how Jim will lose his mind if he sees them hanging out, all the rules he’s built to keep himself safe, to keep chaos out. He shoves his notebook into his jacket pocket, stands up, and says sure.
The boardwalk creaks under their work boots, the ocean breeze is cold enough to make his nose run, and the sky turns pink and orange as the sun dips low over the Pacific. She stops halfway down the pier, leans against the weathered wooden railing, and tells him she heard all the things Jim said, that she didn’t bother correcting anyone because she didn’t care what most people in town thought, but she cared what he did, because she’d seen him leaving tuna for the stray cats behind the laundromat every 6:17 a.m. for three months straight. She says she left Jim because he was drinking every night, cheating on her with a crab shack waitress, that she took half the savings because it was hers too, from 12 years of 12-hour shifts at the fish processing plant. Manny nods, because he’s seen the empty beer cans in Jim’s truck bed, heard him lie about weekend plans, and feels stupid for taking his side without asking.
She reaches up, touches his cheek, her palm calloused from working on her old pickup, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away. They walk off the pier onto the sand, sit on a smooth weathered driftwood log, and she pulls a pack of cherry Sour Patch Kids out of her jacket, dumps half into his open palm. He doesn’t check his watch once, doesn’t worry about getting home at a certain time, doesn’t overthink the fact that half the town will see them together and talk. When she leans her head on his shoulder, he rests his hand on her knee, and doesn’t overthink the weight of it for even a second.
