Ronan O’Malley, 53, spends 90% of his waking hours elbow-deep in the guts of 1960s Evinrudes and Johnsons, running his vintage outboard motor restoration shop out of a weathered boathouse on Lake Huron’s western shore. He’s stubborn to a fault, hasn’t willingly attended a town social event since his wife left him for a traveling pharmaceutical rep 12 years prior, and only showed up to this summer block party because his 16-year-old niece threatened to hide all his specialty socket sets if he didn’t bring his famous smoked whitefish dip.
He’s leaning against a splintered pine picnic table, sweating through the sleeves of his faded gray work flannel (he forgot to change after a last-minute repair that morning, still has a smudge of gear grease on his left jaw) and nursing a lukewarm Pabst, when he spots her across the crowd. Maeve. His ex-wife’s first cousin. He hasn’t seen her in 14 years, not since the big family reunion where she’d snuck him a second slice of key lime pie after his ex had yelled at him for eating too much sugar before a fishing tournament.
She’s carrying a half-empty jar of homemade dill pickles, her sun-bleached blonde hair pulled back in a loose braid that’s already falling out at the temples, and she locks eyes with him before he can look away. She grins, the same crinkles fanning out around her hazel eyes that he remembers, and cuts through the crowd of neighbors and kids chasing each other with water guns straight for him. She stops so close when she reaches him that he can smell coconut sunscreen and sharp, briny dill through the air of grilled hamburgers and cut grass, and her elbow brushes his bicep when she sets the pickle jar down on the table next to his dip.
“Thought that was you,” she says, nodding at the grease stain on his jeans. “Still can’t go anywhere without looking like you just crawled out of a motor block, huh?”
He snorts, suddenly self-conscious of the smudge on his face, and wipes at it with the back of his hand, only smearing it worse. “You still hauling pickles every place you go?”
“Only places that deserve good pickles,” she says, and pops the lid off the jar, holding it out to him. Their fingers brush when he grabs a spear, and he feels a jolt run up his arm that he hasn’t felt in over a decade. He tells himself it’s stupid, she’s family, or at least she was, and everyone in this town would talk if they so much as got caught standing too close together. But he can’t stop looking at the faint smattering of freckles across her nose, the way her cutoffs are frayed at the hem, the silver hoop earring she’s wearing in her left ear that he swears used to be his ex’s.
He doesn’t hesitate. They walk down the packed dirt path lined with wild blackberry bushes, the noise of the party fading behind them, replaced by the soft lapping of lake water against the shore and the first chirp of crickets for the night. She trips over a half-buried oak root 100 yards from his boathouse, and he reaches out automatically, catching her by the waist to steady her. His calloused hand rests on the soft fabric of her tank top for three full beats before he lets go, and she doesn’t step back, doesn’t brush him off, just laughs and swats playfully at his shoulder. “Still the only person who ever catches me when I fall, huh?”
The sentence hangs in the warm, thick summer air between them. He knows what she’s saying, what she’s not saying. He’d always thought his ex was careless with her, too, growing up, always forgetting to pick her up from soccer practice, making fun of her for wanting to study botany instead of getting a “real” job. He’d always felt a little protective of her, even back then, even when he was married, even when he told himself it was just because she was family.
They stop at the end of his boathouse dock, the weathered gray boards warm under their bare feet when they kick off their shoes, and dangle their legs in the cool, shallow lake water. Her shoulder presses tight against his as they sit side by side, watching a loon dive for fish 50 yards out, and when she turns to look at him, her face is lit up by the faint glow of tiki torches strung along his boathouse porch. “I always thought you got a raw deal, you know,” she says, quiet enough that only the crickets can hear her besides him. “She never saw how good you were. How you’d stay up all night fixing a single motor for a kid who couldn’t pay you, how you’d leave extra fish on the porch of the old widows down the road in the winter.”
He feels his throat go tight. No one’s said that to him, not since the divorce, not even his own sister. He reaches out, slow, like he’s approaching a skittish deer, and tucks a loose strand of hair that’s fallen out of her braid behind her ear, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her cheek. She leans into the touch, her hand coming up to rest over his on her face.
The loon calls out, loud and wild, across the lake. He doesn’t care if the gossips from the party see them, doesn’t care if his ex hears about it, doesn’t care about any of the stupid rules he’s been living by for 12 years. He nods back toward the boathouse, where he’d baked a peach pie that morning, still sitting on the kitchen counter cooling. “You hungry?”
She smiles, lacing her fingers through his, and pulls him up off the dock, her bare feet slapping soft against the boards as she leads him toward the porch steps.
