Rafe Marquez, 53, wipes a streak of smoked pork sauce off the toe of his scuffed work boot with a crumpled napkin, the faint, familiar grit of 2-stroke engine grease still crusted under his fingernails from a morning spent rebuilding a 1968 Evinrude for a kid down the road. He’s leaning against the metal beer cooler at the volunteer fire department’s end-of-summer pig roast, the hum of small town chatter wrapping around him like a well-worn flannel, when he spots her.
Clara Hale, 48, the new librarian who moved up from Chicago six months prior, the one every guy in town has written off as stuck-up, the one who chewed out the county commissioner last month for trying to cut the library’s after-school program budget by 40 percent. Rafe has avoided her on purpose for weeks, ever since he hauled a truck bed of vintage motor parts to the library’s flea market and she’d stared at the pile over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses like he’d dumped a load of trash on the front steps. He’d assumed she hated him, same way half the town side-eyes his workshop overflowing with rusted outboards, same way his kids keep hinting he should sell the whole lakefront plot to a resort developer and move into a sterile condo in the city.
He turns to slip away through the crowd, but she calls his name, loud enough to cut through the crackle of the fire pit and the roar of a lawnmower someone brought to show off. He freezes. She’s walking toward him, paper plate of pulled pork in one hand, can of lemon seltzer in the other, a faded Pearl Jam tour t-shirt peeking out under her unbuttoned flannel, a thin, silvery scar snaking up her left wrist from a motorcycle crash she’d mentioned once in the local paper. She stops so close he can smell coconut shampoo mixed with hickory smoke and the faint tang of dill pickles on her plate, and he feels his throat go dry, the way it hasn’t since he was a kid asking his first date to prom.
She laughs, a low, rough sound, when she sees him fumble his beer can, a few drops splashing onto the toe of her scuffed hiking boot. He leans down automatically to wipe it off with his napkin, his knuckles brushing the top of her foot by accident, and a jolt shoots up his arm so sharp he almost drops the napkin entirely. He’s spent seven years shutting that part of himself down, telling himself he’s too old for that kind of spark, that dating anyone would be disrespectful to his late wife, that the town gossip would eat both of them alive if he so much as bought her a coffee. Half of him is screaming to make an excuse and leave, to go back to his workshop and hide among the engine parts where no one expects anything of him, the other half can’t stop staring at the way her eyes crinkle at the corners when she teases him for being jumpy.
She says she’s been looking for him for weeks, that her dad left her a 1972 Mercury outboard when he passed last year, and no one else in town will touch it, says it’s too old, too much of a hassle to fix. She admits she’d stared at his flea market pile not because she thought it was trash, but because she recognized half the parts, had spent every summer of her teen years helping her dad fix up old boats on Lake Michigan. She’d been avoiding him too, she says, because she’d heard he was still grieving, didn’t want to overstep, and every guy in town had warned her Rafe Marquez was “off the market for good” so she shouldn’t bother wasting her time.
The sun dips below the pine trees lining the lake, painting the sky pink and tangerine, when she asks if he wants to walk down to her boathouse to look at the motor, says she’s got a cooler of hazy IPA stashed there if he’s got time. He hesitates for half a second, thinking of the group of guys by the fire pit definitely watching them, thinking of his daughter’s text that morning nagging him about the developer’s offer, thinking of all the unspoken small town rules that say he should say no, keep his head down, stay the quiet widower everyone expects him to be. He says yes.
They walk down the dirt path leading to the shore, her shoulder brushing his every three or four steps, the sound of crickets chirping mixing with the soft lap of lake water against the docks. When they get to her boathouse, she stops on the weathered wooden dock first, sits down, pats the spot next to her, and when he sits, she rests her hand on his knee for a beat, her palm warm through the worn denim of his jeans, when she tells the story of how she dropped the Mercury out the back of her pickup truck when she first moved up, scraping the paint so bad her dad would’ve teased her for weeks.
He tells her about the Evinrude he’s fixing for the kid, about how he built his workshop with his own two hands the year he got married, about how he’s been scared to tell his kids he doesn’t want to sell the lake property, scared they’ll think he’s being selfish, stuck in the past. She doesn’t tell him he’s being silly, doesn’t push him to make a decision, just nods, and says it sounds like the workshop is the best part of him, that no one gets to ask him to give that up.
When they stand up to go inside the boathouse to look at the motor, she laces her fingers through his, her calloused hand from years of stacking books and fixing fence posts fitting perfectly against his grease-stained, engine-worn one. A car passes on the road above the lake, headlights sweeping across them for a split second, and he doesn’t even bother pulling his hand away.
