Ronan O’Malley, 62, retired commercial abalone diver, had only shown up to the Eureka community crab feed because his oldest daughter had threatened to stop bringing his 4-year-old granddaughter by his coastal cottage if he spent another Friday night alone re-watching 90s fishing documentaries. His jeans still carried a faint, briny salt stain from the previous weekend’s trip out on his friend’s salmon boat, his knuckles crisscrossed with thin, silvery scars from decades of handling heavy dive gear and sharp abalone irons. He sat on a wobbly folding table at the back of the canvas tent, nursing a cold Bud Light, and avoided making eye contact with every woman who walked past, a habit he’d honed over the 8 years since his wife Eileen had died of ovarian cancer. He’d spent most of those years convinced even glancing at another woman for longer than two seconds was a betrayal, no matter how many times his kids told him Eileen would’ve kicked his ass for moping.
The first time he noticed Clara, she was clearing a stack of empty crab shell plates from the table next to his, a streak of flour on the cuff of her forest green flannel, her dark hair streaked with silver pulled back in a messy braid. She smelled like lemon zest and Old Bay, warm and sharp, when she leaned past his shoulder to grab a half-empty bowl of melted butter off his table, her upper arm brushing his bicep for half a beat longer than necessary. She paused, making eye contact, her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners when she spotted the faded Dive Eureka sticker on the front of his well-worn trucker hat. “You’re the guy who fixed that collapsed section of sea wall on the bluff last month, right? I saw you hauling cinder blocks down the trail. I’m Clara, I do the catering for most of these town events.”
Ronan froze, his beer halfway to his mouth, and managed a grunted yes before his brain caught up. He hadn’t had a woman look at him like that—curious, unhurried, like he was more than just the quiet widower who kept to himself—since Eileen got sick. A twist of guilt tangled with something hotter, sharper, low in his gut, and he almost got up and left right then, angry at himself for even noticing the way her jeans fit just right, the faint smudge of butter on her jaw.
He hung around anyway, forcing himself to make small talk with the guy sitting next to him who sold used pickup parts, until the line for the drink cooler died down. He was reaching for another Bud when she rounded the corner of the cooler, holding a can of sparkling water, and laughed when she saw him. “Thought you’d bailed. I’ve been asking around about you. Someone told me you found that sunken fishing boat off the coast back in 2019, the one that went down in the storm with three guys on it.”
He nodded, leaning against the cooler post to keep his hands steady, and told her about the dive, how the current had been so strong he’d almost lost his regulator, how a seal had stolen his catch right out of his net ten minutes before he spotted the boat’s hull half-buried in sand. When he finished laughing at the memory, he realized her hand was resting lightly on his wrist, her fingers calloused from kneading sourdough for her catering business, her thumb brushing the raised scar on his forearm from a run-in with a spiny sea urchin in 2007. The noise of the tent faded for a second, the roar of the Pacific half a mile away the only sound he could hear, and the guilt he’d been carrying for 8 years felt smaller, lighter, like it had been washed out with the tide. He didn’t feel like he was betraying Eileen anymore. He felt like she was right there, rolling her eyes at him for taking so long to stop being an idiot.
“You free tomorrow morning?” he asked, before he could talk himself out of it. “The diner by the marina makes the best sourdough pancakes on the coast. I can take you down to the docks after, show you the 1978 Boston Whaler I’m restoring in my garage, if you want.”
Clara smiled, pulling a pen out of her apron pocket and scribbling her phone number on a napkin printed with a cartoon crab. She tucked it into the breast pocket of his flannel, her fingers brushing his chest through the thin fabric, and nodded. “7 a.m. Don’t be late. I hate cold pancakes.”
Ronan stood there holding his beer, watching her walk back to the catering table, her work boots squelching a little in the damp grass under the tent, and for the first time in 8 years, he didn’t have to force himself to smile.
