Manny Ruiz, 59, retired airshow stunt plane mechanic, had his Friday routine down to a science. He’d knock off fixing outboard motors at his garage a little after 6, scrub the worst of the grease from under his nails, pull on his faded Navy flannel and scuffed work boots, and head straight to the VFW on the edge of town for their weekly cod fish fry. He always took the same booth by the west window, where he could watch the sun dip over the coastal pines while he ate hushpuppies and listened to the group of retired loggers argue about Pac-12 football.
The first thing he noticed when he walked in that night was that his booth was occupied. He paused in the entry, the smell of fried batter and cheap lager wrapping around him, and squinted. The woman sitting there was in her late 50s, silver streaks shot through her dark hair pulled back in a loose braid, a single thick silver hoop in her left ear, a tiny tattoo of a seaplane curling around her wrist as she flipped through a dog-eared copy of Air & Space magazine. The only open seat in the whole space was across from her. He hesitated for a full ten seconds, weighing the annoyance of sitting with a stranger against the appeal of skipping the microwave fish sticks he had in his fridge at home, then walked over.
He nodded at the empty bench. “This seat taken?”
She looked up, hazel eyes crinkling at the corners, and shook her head. She pushed a plate of extra coleslaw toward the middle of the table as he sat, the cuff of her linen button-down brushing his forearm when she moved. “Help yourself. I ordered too much, and they make it too sour here for my taste.”
He grunted a thanks, grabbed a fork, and took a bite. It was too sour, just like she said. He glanced down at her wrist, at the seaplane tattoo, then at the patch on his own hat, the faded 2011 Reno Air Races patch he’d sewn on himself after his favorite pilot took first place in the unlimited class. She noticed him looking, and tapped the tattoo with one finger, her nail chipped with bright red polish. “My dad flew a P-51 in the civilian demonstrations there back in the 90s. I grew up crawling around hangars, getting yelled at for touching the control sticks.”
Manny found himself leaning forward before he even thought about it. He’d not talked about his airshow days with anyone in town, had kept that part of his life locked away tight after his ex-wife left him for a Reno real estate agent 12 years prior, convinced no one around here cared about turbine engines and aerobatic routines. For the next 45 minutes, he told her stories about fixing a faulty fuel line mid-show weekend, about the pilot who’d accidentally dumped a full tank of blue smoke over a county fair parade, about the way the air smelled like jet fuel and popcorn at every show he ever worked. She laughed loud at the parade story, her knee brushing his under the table when she shifted to get more comfortable, and he felt a jolt go up his spine he hadn’t felt in decades.
Halfway through his second beer, the part of him that’d spent 12 years building walls between himself and anyone who might get too close started screaming to leave, to make up an excuse about a motor he had to fix early the next day, to get back to his quiet empty house where he didn’t have to risk being disappointed again. He tensed up, his hand curling around his beer bottle so tight his knuckles went white, and she noticed. She didn’t push, just leaned back and took a sip of her own beer, nodding at the small scar across his knuckle from a time a propeller blade nicked him during a pre-flight check. “I got one just like that, on my ankle. Dropped a wrench on myself when I was restoring my Cessna last year.”
She told him she was in town for the coastal seaplane meet happening the following weekend, that she flew a 1952 Cessna 195 on floats, docked down at the marina a few blocks from his garage. She paused, biting her lower lip a little, and rested her hand on the table two inches from his, her fingers calloused from gripping control sticks, same as his were from gripping wrenches. “I was gonna take her up for a test flight tomorrow morning, check the carburetor I just replaced. Would you wanna come? I could use a second set of eyes that knows their way around a piston engine.”
Manny froze. Every self-defensive instinct he had told him to say no, to tell her he had too much work to do, to go back to his safe predictable routine. He looked at her, at the way the fluorescent lights caught the silver in her hair, at the seaplane tattoo on her wrist, at the small smile playing on her lips, and the words died in his throat. He nodded, before he could overthink it. “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good.”
They finished their beers a few minutes later, walked out into the parking lot together, the cool coastal air smelling like salt and pine and leftover fried food from the VFW dumpster. She pulled a crumpled napkin out of her bag, scribbled her cell number and the dock number on it, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his flannel, her fingers brushing his chest lightly when she did. He stood there watching her drive off in a beat up forest green Subaru with a seaplane sticker on the back bumper, twisting the edge of the napkin between his fingers, already waiting to hear the low rumble of her Cessna’s engine firing up the next morning.
