Rafe Marquez is 51, makes his living restoring vintage fishing reels out of the sunporch of his 1920s bungalow on the Oregon coast, and hasn’t willingly attended a community event since his wife left him for a Portland real estate broker eight years prior. The only reason he’s at the annual waterfront fish fry is his best friend Duke threatened to drop off a dozen broken Penn reels on his porch at 6 a.m. all week if he bailed. He’s leaning against the beer tent, wiping permanent grease smudges off the cuff of his faded flannel, when someone slams into his side hard enough to slosh half his IPA down his jeans.
The woman who bumps into him is Lena Hart, the newly elected city council rep who just voted to raise home business licensing fees by 40 percent, the same fee hike Rafe has been drafting furious, unhinged emails about for three weeks straight. Her glass of rosé has spilled all over the front of his flannel, pink streaks mixing with the grease stains, and she’s laughing so hard she snorts, before she claps a hand over her mouth. “Oh, shit, I am so sorry. My dog ran after a seagull and I had to yank him back before he stole a kid’s hushpuppy.”
She grabs a handful of napkins from the stack by the tent, and their hands brush when she passes them to him. He catches the scent of lavender sunscreen mixed with sea salt and fried catfish smoke, and he freezes for half a second, like he’s touched a live wire. She holds his gaze, no awkward look away, the corner of her mouth ticking up when she recognizes him. “You’re Rafe, right? The reel restorer who’s been sending me those very colorful emails about the licensing fees.”
He grunts, dabbing at the rosé on his shirt, ready to launch into the speech he’s rehearsed for weeks about nickel and diming small business owners, but she nods at the empty spot on the splintered picnic bench next to her, and he sits before he can think better of it. Their knees press together under the table, and she doesn’t shift away, even though there’s three feet of empty bench on her other side. She leans in when he rants about the fee, elbow on the table, chin propped on her hand, and when he finishes, she pulls a folded paper out of her pocket, the storm drain improvement plan he never bothered to read past the first line.
The fee hike, she explains, is earmarked entirely for replacing the 70-year-old storm drains on his side of town, the same drains that flood his sunporch workshop every winter, ruining at least two hundred dollars worth of parts annually. He’d been so focused on being angry he never bothered to check the fine print. He feels like an idiot, and when she laughs at the look on his face, he finds himself laughing too, a rough, rusty sound he hasn’t heard come out of his own mouth in months.
They talk for an hour, the noise of the fish fry fading into background static. She runs a wildlife rehab clinic out of her garage on the weekends, tells him a story about an otter she rescued last month that chewed through three of her work boots. He pulls the custom brass reel he finished for a client that morning out of his work bag to show her, and her fingers brush his when she takes it, turning it over to run her thumb over the hand-engraved salmon on the side. Her hands are calloused, scraped on the knuckle from a recent raccoon rescue, and the jolt that travels up his arm is so sharp he has to fight not to shiver.
He keeps glancing around, half-expecting to see someone he knows staring. Small town gossip travels faster than a summer gale, and everyone knows he’s the grumpy recluse who hasn’t so much as bought a woman a drink since his split. The last thing he needs is half the town speculating that he’s sleeping with the city council rep to get out of paying fees, but the longer he sits there, the less he cares.
When the first firework booms over the bay, painting the sky neon pink, she grabs his hand to yank him through the crowd of people heading for the dock. He doesn’t pull away. Her palm is warm, a little sweaty, and her shoulder presses tight to his when they stop at the end of the wooden dock, the waves lapping at the posts below their feet. “I have my dad’s old 1960s Penn reel in my garage,” she says, turning to look at him, the fireworks reflecting gold in her eyes. “I’ve been trying to find someone to restore it for years. Wanna come over after to take a look? I have a bottle of good bourbon stashed under my sink.”
He hesitates for half a second, thinking about the unopened stack of mail on his kitchen counter, the three reels he needs to finish by the end of the week, the gossip that will be all over the local Facebook group by tomorrow morning. Then he squeezes her hand, and nods.
He walks her to her beat-up pickup truck a few minutes later, opens the passenger door for her. She tucks a strand of wind-tousled hair behind her ear, and brushes her thumb lightly over the stubble on his jaw before she climbs in. The faint pop of leftover fireworks drifted over the water as he turned the key in his own truck, already counting the minutes until he’d knock on her front door.
