Rafe Mendez, 53, spent 28 years as an air traffic controller before he took early retirement four years prior, two weeks after his wife Carol died of ovarian cancer. His whole career was built on avoiding risk, counting variables, never making a move unless he’d run every possible outcome a dozen times, and that habit seeped into every corner of his life after Carol was gone. He ate the same oatmeal for breakfast every morning, walked the same three mile loop at the same time every evening, took the same booth at Mac’s Tavern every Tuesday for trivia, no exceptions. He’d turned down three different setups from Carol’s friends, told them he was fine on his own, and he almost believed it.
The air in Mac’s smelled like fried cheese curds and stale beer, sawdust sprinkled across the linoleum to soak up the occasional spill, Johnny Cash’s *Folsom Prison Blues* humming low from the jukebox between trivia rounds. Rafe was half through his third IPA, already had a perfect score on the 90s college basketball round, when Lila Marlow leaned over his booth to set a fresh frosty mug down beside his half-empty one. He’d known Lila since she was 12, the daughter of Carol’s best friend, the kid who used to crash their backyard barbecues and beg him to teach her to fix the old transistor radios he restored in his garage. She was 32 now, just moved back to town after a messy divorce, had taken over the Tuesday trivia gig a month prior, and Rafe had spent every Tuesday since actively avoiding looking at her for too long.
Her flannel shirt was rolled up to the elbows, a tiny Orion tattoo curling around her left wrist he didn’t remember, the edge of her elbow brushing his forearm when she set the beer down. The contact was light, just a split second, but Rafe felt it shoot up his arm, warm and sharp, and he fumbled the trivia answer sheet he’d been holding. She laughed, a low, rough sound, same as when she was a teen and she’d snuck a sip of Carol’s wine at Thanksgiving. “Knew you’d nail that 1987 Final Four question,” she said, sliding into the booth across from him, her knee brushing his under the table. “Mom always said you could rattle off sports stats faster than you could clear a runway for a 747.”
Rafe’s throat went tight. He knew what people would say if they saw them sitting this close, knee to knee, her leaning in like no one else was in the bar. A 21 year age gap, him knowing her since she was 12, their families tied together by decades of holidays, funerals, backyard cookouts. It was wrong, he told himself, a betrayal of Carol, of her mom, of every unspoken rule of their small Portland suburb. He wanted to make an excuse, get up and leave, pretend he hadn’t noticed the gold flecks in her hazel eyes, the faint vanilla and menthol scent of her hair when she leaned close.
She slid a crumpled piece of notebook paper across the sticky table, her fingers brushing his when he reached for it. It was Carol’s loopy, messy handwriting, dated three weeks before she died. Rafe’s hands shook as he read: if she was gone, she didn’t want him to spend the rest of his life playing it safe, that he’d spent long enough worrying about everyone else’s safety, that he deserved to be happy even if it was with someone she never would have guessed. “I found it in a box of mom’s old books last week,” Lila said, soft, no teasing now. “Carol gave it to her to hold onto, said you’d fight it too hard if she gave it to you directly. I’ve been working up the nerve to give it to you for three weeks.”
The bar noise faded to a hum around him, the clink of beer mugs, the crack of pool balls, the guy at the next table yelling about a bad trivia call all distant, like he was hearing them through water. He folded the note, tucked it into the front pocket of his work flannel, right over his heart. He’d spent four years telling himself he didn’t deserve anything good, that taking any kind of risk would end in disaster, that the safest move was to just go through the motions until he was gone too. For the first time since Carol died, he didn’t overthink it.
“Mac’s closes in an hour,” he said, leaning forward a little, his knee pressing firmer against hers under the table, no more accidental brushes. “The 24 hour diner down on Burnside still makes those blueberry pancakes you used to beg me to make for you when you’d sneak over after fights with your mom. You wanna go?”
Lila’s face lit up, the same wide, unselfconscious grin she’d had when she was 14 and he’d taught her to take apart a 1970s Sony radio and put it back together. She nodded, standing up to head back to the mic for the final trivia round, squeezing his shoulder quick before she turned. Rafe sat back, took a sip of the cold beer she’d brought him, watched her lean into the mic to tease the biker table in the back for their terrible 2000s pop culture scores. He reached into his pocket, brushed his fingers against the crumpled note, and smiled.
