Manny Ruiz is 62, a retired oil rig safety inspector who spends most days on his 17-foot bass boat or tinkering with the 1972 Ford F-150 he’s owned since he was 25. His biggest flaw is that he’s spent 30 years treating every unplanned choice like a potential rig explosion, mapping out worst-case scenarios before he even says yes to a lunch invite. He still kicks himself for turning down a 10-day Paris trip with his late wife Linda in 2018, turned it down because the forecast called for thunderstorms over the Atlantic, and he’d read three recent reports about commercial jet engine failures. She never brought it up again, but he found the crumpled, annotated itinerary in her nightstand after she passed from lung cancer two years later.
He’s leaning against the dented steel beer cooler at the VFW’s annual crawfish boil on a sticky May Saturday, boots caked in lake mud from the bass tournament earlier that day, when Clara Hale steps into his orbit. She’s 48, runs the bait shop on the west end of the lake, married to Jake Hale, the county commissioner who’d rigged the tournament scoring to beat Manny by two ounces that morning, same guy who’s spent the last four years blocking public access to three of the lake’s best fishing coves so his country club buddies can hoard them for themselves. Manny’s hated Jake for years, has avoided all events where he might have to shake the guy’s soft, callus-free hand.
Clara’s carrying a tray of still-steaming hushpuppies, her yellow sundress dotted with flecks of cayenne, bare legs streaked with a faint smear of fish grease near the ankle. A kid darting after a stray dog slams into her side, and she stumbles sideways, her elbow brushing Manny’s forearm hard enough that he can feel the sun-warmed heat of her skin through the thin cotton of his faded work shirt. She apologizes, laughing, and sets the tray down on the picnic table next to him, sliding onto the bench across first before shifting to sit right next to him, their knees almost touching under the splintered wood.
She says she watched the weigh-in, saw Manny’s 6-pound largemouth, knows Jake’s cousin who ran the scoring fudged the numbers. No one’s said that out loud all day, most people too scared of getting their boat registration denied next year to cross Jake. Manny blinks, takes a sip of his lukewarm Lone Star, and nods. She leans in when she talks, the scent of coconut sunscreen and boiled sweet corn rolling off her hair, and her knee brushes his intentionally this time, no kid to blame it on. He feels a hot twist in his gut, half desire half disgust—disgust that he’s even noticing how her dress rides up her thigh when she crosses her legs, disgust that he’s even considering entertaining attention from Jake Hale’s wife, a line he’d never in a million years think he’d come close to crossing.
The band playing by the door switches to a slow ZZ Top deep cut, and the crowd thins out a little as people drift to the dance floor. Clara rests her hand on the table between them, an inch away from his, her thumb smudged with minnow slime from restocking bait tanks that morning, chipped pale blue nail polish glinting in the string lights strung over the table. She holds his eye contact, no shyness, no darting away, and says Jake’s driving to Austin for a three-day conference that night, has been bragging about the golf rounds he’s scheduled there for weeks. She says she’s heard Manny’s the only person who knows how to get to the hidden cove on the north end of the lake, the one with the sand beach and the bass beds no one else has fished in 10 years, asks if he’d be willing to take her there tomorrow morning.
Manny freezes for half a second, his brain automatically running through the list of worst case scenarios: Jake finds out, gets him banned from the lake for life, the entire small town gossips, he ruins the quiet, respectable reputation he’s spent 40 years building. Then he remembers the crumpled Paris itinerary in Linda’s nightstand, remembers her soft voice saying she wished he’d stopped worrying about what could go wrong long enough to enjoy what could go right. He nods, says he’ll pick her up at the bait shop dock at 7 a.m., tells her to bring a cooler of cold beer and a wide-brimmed hat, the sun gets brutal over the cove by 9.
She grins, squeezes his wrist quick, her fingers calloused from tying fishing knots and hauling 50-pound bait buckets, before she stands up to grab another tray of hushpuppies from the food table. Manny watches her walk away, the cayenne from the crawfish he just ate burning the tip of his tongue, and pops the cap off another Lone Star without checking the expiration date first.
