Rafe Marquez, 58, makes custom hand-carved fishing lures out of his garage outside Bemidji, Minnesota, and hasn’t so much as asked a woman out for coffee since his wife Diane left him for a travel nurse seven years prior. His biggest flaw, the one his old drilling rig buddies rib him for every time they come up to fish, is that he’s stubbornly convinced dating at his age is just grasping for a cheap replacement for the life he lost, and he refuses to settle for anything that doesn’t feel like it matters. He’s set up his booth at the Beltrami County Fair the third week of August, same spot he’s held for 12 years, rows of glossy walleye and bass lures lined up on reclaimed cedar shelves, each one painted with tiny, precise scales he spends hours perfecting after dinner. The air still smells like cut grass and the gas station cold coffee he’d picked up on the drive in, the food vendors haven’t fired up their fryers yet, and the only sound is the clink of metal tent stakes and the distant low of cattle from the 4-H barn.
He’s kneeling to run an extension cord to the power outlet bolted to the ground between his booth and the one next to him when another hand brushes his. Calloused in a different way, softer at the fingertips, dotted with a few faint purple jam stains. He looks up, and it’s Maeve, Diane’s younger cousin by nine years, 49, who he hasn’t seen in three years, not since Diane’s mom’s funeral. She’s wearing a faded lumberjack flannel over a white tank top, work boots caked in garden mud, the faint scar above her left eyebrow still pale pink, the same one she got when he was driving the boat on a family tubing trip 16 years prior and she hit a wake wrong. She laughs, pulls her hand back like she’s been burned, and says she’s taking over her mom’s jam booth this year, since her mom’s knee replacement surgery kept her home.
They make small talk at first, stiff, careful, like they’re both tiptoeing around the unspoken line between them. He’d always liked Maeve back when he was married, thought she was the only one in Diane’s family who didn’t judge him for dropping out of college to work the North Dakota oil rigs before he started carving lures full time. He’d forgotten he carved that tiny trout pendant she’s wearing around her neck, for her 30th birthday, until she taps it with one finger and says she still wears it every time she goes fishing up at Lake Itasca. His throat goes dry, he can’t think of anything to say, so he turns to adjust a row of lures and knocks over a jar of her wild raspberry jam. It doesn’t break, but the lid pops off, sweet, tart smell flooding the small space between their booths. He grabs for it at the same time she does, their heads bump, and he can smell her shampoo, pine and something bright and citrusy, when she leans in close to wipe a smudge of jam off his cheek with her thumb.
He pulls back immediately, flustered, tells himself he’s being an idiot, that she’s family, that regulars at the fair would talk if they saw them acting like that. He spends the next three hours avoiding eye contact, helping customers who stop to buy lures, listening to her laugh with old ladies who come to buy her spicy dill pickles, hating that every time she laughs he feels his chest tighten, like he’s 22 again and nervous to ask a girl out to the drive-in. The sky turns dark all of a sudden, a quick August downpour rolling in without warning, wind whipping the tent flaps so hard one of his shelf units tips. He grabs for it, slips on the gravel that’s already turning to mud, and she lunges to steady him, her hands wrapped tight around his bicep, their bodies pressed chest to chest for three full seconds, he can feel the heat of her through their flannels, her breath warm against his neck.
They huddle under the edge of the tent while the rain pours, water running off the edge in thick sheets, no customers around, everyone running for cover. She says she’s had a crush on him since she was 22, when he came to her college graduation party and fixed her car’s flat tire in the rain, never said anything because he was married, then after the divorce she thought he’d never even look at her twice, too wrapped up in being sad and stubborn. He stares at her, shocked, admits he’s thought about her too, more times than he can count, but always told himself it was wrong, that crossing that line would mess up whatever was left of the family ties he still cared about. She snorts, teases him that Diane’s busy dating a golf pro in Naples who wears white linen pants every single day, and her mom’s been nagging her to stop dating guys who live in their parents’ basements for 10 years, so the only person who’d be mad is Diane’s cat, and he lives in Florida so who cares.
The rain stops as fast as it started, the sun coming out, steam rising off the wet gravel, the smell of fried dough and cotton candy drifting down the row again. A group of 10-year-old boys from the local 4-H fishing club runs over, crowding around his booth to look at the lures, and Maeve stays to help him explain how he carves each one by hand, how he tests every single design out on the lake behind his house before he sells them. When the fair closes at 9 p.m., they’re both packing up their booths, and he stops, wipes the sweat off his forehead, asks her if she wants to go to the diner on the edge of town for rhubarb pie, the kind she used to beg Diane to make for Thanksgiving. She grins, says yes, and slings her canvas bag of empty jam jars over her shoulder. He holds the passenger door of his beat-up Ford F-150 open for her, his hand brushing the small of her back for two seconds longer than he needs to, and she leans into the touch, no hesitation. When she slid onto the bench seat next to him, her thigh pressed warm against his through the worn denim of their jeans, and he didn’t move away.
