Ronan O’Malley, 62, retired commercial salmon fishing captain, had spent the last four years hiding from exactly this kind of chaos. The annual Cannon Beach crab boil reeked of Old Bay, melted butter, and cheap domestic beer, kids screamed as they chased each other through the gravel parking lot of the community center, and every third person who passed him clapped him on the back and asked how he was holding up. He’d only shown up because his 78-year-old neighbor Marnie had banged on his door at 2 PM holding a Tupperware of her famous chocolate chip cookies and threatened to hide all his custom reel repair tools if he didn’t get out of the house. He was standing by the industrial cooler, half-hidden behind a stack of paper plates, planning to sneak out in 10 minutes, when she leaned past him.
Her linen button-down brushed his bare forearm, cool and slightly damp from the coastal mist, and he caught a whiff of sea salt and sage, the same scent his wife used to burn in candle form on rainy winter days. She reached for a citrus seltzer on the lower shelf, her auburn hair streaked with gray falling forward over her shoulder, and when she stood up she held his gaze for three full beats, no awkward look away, no quick smile and scurry off. She was 54, he remembered, Elara, his late wife’s younger cousin, the one who’d been 16 at their wedding, who’d snuck a flask of spiked rum into the reception and made him laugh so hard he’d dropped the cake cutting knife into the punch bowl. He hadn’t seen her since that day.
His first instinct was to mumble a greeting and bolt. He’d spent years forcing down any flicker of interest in anyone that wasn’t his wife, felt a hot twist of guilt even looking at Elara now, like he was cheating on a promise. But she grinned, crinkling the faint laugh lines around her hazel eyes, and teased him about the punch bowl incident before he could even open his mouth. He laughed before he could stop himself, a rough, rusty sound he hadn’t heard come out of his own throat in months.
She leaned against the cooler next to him, close enough that their shoulders brushed every time one of them shifted, and they talked for 20 minutes straight. She told him she’d moved back to town two weeks prior, bought the old empty shop on Main Street to open a pottery studio, that she’d spent the last 20 years in Portland making custom ceramic mugs for cafes. He told her about the reel repair side business he ran out of his garage, about the 40-pound king salmon he’d caught last month on a solo trip out to the continental shelf, even though he’d told himself he’d never talk about his fishing trips with anyone but his wife again. When a group of teens ran past chasing a runaway beach ball, she tripped over a loose cooler cord and grabbed his bicep to steady herself, her palm warm and calloused from wedging clay, and he didn’t pull away. He found himself leaning into the touch, just a little.
They snuck off toward the pier a few minutes later, avoiding the crowd that was starting to do a wobbly line dance to a 90s country cover. The pier wood was weathered and rough under his jeans when they sat down, the waves crashing soft and steady against the pilings below them, and she pulled a ziplock bag of dill-cured smoked salmon out of her canvas bag, passed him a piece. She said she’d brought it just in case she ran into him, that his wife used to send her letters every Christmas bragging about how he cured salmon better than any smokehouse on the coast.
The twist of guilt came back hard then, and he told her the truth, that he felt wrong even sitting here talking to her, like he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to. She didn’t get defensive, didn’t tell him he was being silly. She just nodded, took a bite of salmon, and said his wife had called her six months before she died, told her she was going to leave her his number in her will, told her to make sure he didn’t turn into a hermit once she was gone.
He stared at her, stunned, for a long second, and when she leaned in to brush a crumb of salmon off his jaw, her thumb lingering for a beat against his stubble, he didn’t flinch. He could hear the distant sound of the crowd laughing, the gulls crying overhead, the soft rush of the tide coming in, and for the first time in four years, he didn’t feel like he was drowning in grief.
He asked her if she wanted to come by his garage tomorrow, said he had a box of old glass fishing floats he’d been hauling around for decades, didn’t know what to do with them, thought a potter might have ideas for mounting them with ceramic bases to sell in her studio. She nodded, pulled her phone out of her pocket and slipped it into his hand, her fingers brushing his as she did. He typed his number in slow, his hands a little unsteady, and when he handed it back she saved it under “Ronan Punch Bowl O’Malley.”
When she tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear and grins up at him, he realizes the tight, cold knot in his chest that’s been there for four years has finally loosened, just enough to let a little light in.
