Manny Ruiz, 59, has spent the last seven years making himself scarce at every small-town Oregon coast event he can avoid. A vintage camper restoration specialist with calluses thick enough to sand cedar barehanded and a stubborn streak wider than the bed of his dented 1972 F-250, he’s got one hard rule: no unnecessary small talk, no unnecessary connections, no reason to give the gossips downtown anything to chatter about. He only agreed to show up to the August block party because his 16-year-old granddaughter begged him to man her 4-H lemonade stand for 20 minutes while she ran to the food truck for tacos. Now he’s leaning against the side of his truck, sweating through the armpits of his faded Carhartt work shirt, sipping a lukewarm Pabst, and pointedly not looking at the woman who moved into the blue clapboard house two doors down three weeks prior.
Clara Bennett is 57, ex-wife of Jake Carter, the guy who broke Manny’s nose during the 1982 high school state football playoff. Manny’s seen her out in her yard planting peonies, hauling bags of soil, grilling on her back porch at sunset, and every time he’s ducked behind his fence or gunned his truck down the street before she can wave. He tells himself it’s respect for his late wife Elena, who died of ovarian cancer seven years prior, that he’s too old for silly crushes, that getting tangled up with his old rival’s ex is the kind of mess he doesn’t need in his quiet, ordered life. But he can’t stop noticing little things: the way she tucks her gray-streaked auburn hair behind her ear when she’s focused, the scuffed white cowboy boots she wears even when she’s gardening, the sound of her laugh when her college-aged daughter visits, loud and throaty and unapologetic.
He’s so busy pretending to stare at his granddaughter’s lemonade sign that he doesn’t notice she’s walking right toward him until the shoulder of her linen sun dress brushes his bare bicep. He jumps a little, and she grins, holding a sweating can of cherry seltzer in one hand, a crumpled slip of notebook paper in the other. The air between them smells like coconut sunscreen, grilled onions, and the lavender shampoo Elena used to use, and for half a second he’s so thrown he almost drops his beer. She holds his gaze steady, no polite darting away, no awkward small talk preamble, and he can see a smudge of charcoal on the edge of her jaw, from the burger she was grilling earlier, he guesses.
“Heard you’re the guy who can fix anything that’s made of wood or metal,” she says, shifting her weight so her hip is almost pressed to his truck next to his. “My back deck step rotted out last week. Tried to fix it myself, drilled right through my thumb instead. Don’t really feel like making a second trip to the urgent care this month.”
Manny’s throat goes dry. He knows half the town is watching them right now, including Jake’s cousin who runs the hardware store, leaning against a picnic table across the street and staring daggers. The little voice in his head is screaming to turn her down, say he’s booked solid for the next month, go home and lock the door like he always does. But when she holds out the slip of paper with her phone number scrawled on it, their fingers brush, and he feels a jolt up his arm like the static he gets when he forgets to ground his belt sander. Her index finger has a callus on the tip, the same kind he has on his thumbs from holding a sanding block for hours, and he realizes she’s not some delicate thing he has to tiptoe around.
“I know you were married to Elena,” she says, soft enough no one else can hear, before he can say anything. “She taught my niece pottery down at the community center for years. I wouldn’t be over here bugging you if I thought you were still stuck in that mourning rut everyone in town loves to talk about.”
That cuts right through the noise in his head. He’s spent seven years letting people tiptoe around him, letting them call him a grieving widower like it’s his whole identity, and he’s tired of it. Tired of eating frozen dinners alone, tired of working 12 hour days just to have something to do, tired of driving past her house every day and wondering what it would be like to stop and say hello.
“I can come by tomorrow at 10,” he says, tucking the slip of paper into the front pocket of his worn work jeans. “Got extra pressure treated lumber in the back of the truck. Don’t even have to run to the hardware store.” He smirks, nodding at the peach pie he saw her set on her picnic table ten minutes earlier, still in the glass Pyrex dish. “You pay me in a slice of that pie, not beer. I drink enough beer alone in my garage as it is.”
She laughs, leaning in so close her lips almost brush his ear, and he can feel the heat of her breath on his neck. “I’ll save you the whole damn pie if you stay for dinner after you’re done fixing the step.” She winks, then turns and walks back toward her grill, flipping off Jake’s cousin over her shoulder when he glares at her.
Manny takes a long sip of his beer, watching his granddaughter run back toward the lemonade stand holding two tacos, grinning so wide her cheeks are pink. The sun is dipping low over the ocean, painting the sky pink and orange, and for the first time in seven years he doesn’t feel like he’s waiting for something bad to happen. When Clara turns around and winks at him over the top of her paper plate, he lifts his beer in a toast, already mentally making a list of supplies he’ll need for the step, and the unopened bottle of peach wine he’s had sitting on his kitchen counter for a year that he can bring along.
