Elias Voss, 52, makes his living restoring frayed vintage travel posters, touching up faded pigment on shots of 1960s Hawaiian surf breaks and Pacific Northwest lighthouses from the quiet of his converted Astoria garage shop. He’s got a flaw he’s well aware of: 12 years out from his wife leaving him for a younger park ranger coworker, he avoids even casual small talk with anyone who knew them as a couple, too tired of picking sides or fielding awkward questions about what went wrong. Most nights he eats takeout salmon at his workbench, and the only time he regularly leaves the property is Thursday evenings, when he heads to the waterfront beer garden for a hazy IPA and a smoked salmon slathered in dill cream cheese.
Mid-July, the beer garden is packed, spillover from the weekly farmers’ market that runs until 7. He’s just settled into his usual picnic table when a heavy wooden crate of mason jars thuds down so close to his scuffed work boot it brushes the laces. The woman carrying it drops into the bench across from him, huffing a laugh when he jumps, and he immediately recognizes her: Mara, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one who used to show up to their backyard barbecues with dyed blue hair and a skateboard slung over her shoulder, who he’d barely exchanged three sentences with the entire time he was married, out of some unspoken rule that family was off-limits even to look at too long.
Salt air sticks to the back of his neck, and he can smell dill brine and coconut sunscreen coming off her flannel and overalls, can hear the squawk of seagulls fighting over a dropped pretzel a few tables over. She shifts to pull her phone out of her overalls pocket, and her knee brushes his under the table, warm through the worn denim of his jeans. He freezes, half expecting her to yank away, to snap at him for even sitting in the same space as her, but she just grins, crinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes, and nods at the half-finished IPA in front of him. “They got the good batch on tap this week, huh? I grabbed three pints before they ran out earlier.”
His first instinct is to make an excuse, grab his sandwich, and leave. Disgust pricks at him first, sharp and familiar—all the messy, ugly parts of his divorce he’s spent a decade running from, tied up in the woman sitting across from him, who’s definitely heard every one-sided version of the split his ex has spewed over family dinners. But then she slides a small sample jar of pickled asparagus across the table, and their fingers brush when he takes it, her palm calloused from hauling crates, the cold glass of the jar sending a little jolt up his arm. “Tried a new brine recipe this week. Garlic and dill, extra spicy. Figured you’d like it, you always used to dump hot sauce on everything at the cookouts.”
He blinks, surprised she remembers that small, stupid detail. He eats the asparagus, it’s crisp and spicy, better than any pickles he’s had in years. They talk, first about the market, then about his poster work—she remembers the old Cannon Beach surf poster he restored for their garage back in 2012, says she always thought it was the coolest thing she’d ever seen. He learns she’s been running the pickled veg stand for 8 years, lives in a tiny cabin outside of Seaside, hasn’t spoken to his ex in three years after a fight over a family inheritance.
By their second beer, the sun’s dipping low over the Columbia River, painting the sky pink and tangerine, and the crowd’s thinned out enough that they shift to the same side of the table to get out of the cool breeze coming off the water. Her shoulder presses against his, no accident this time, and when she leans in to tell him a story about his ex’s 22nd birthday, when she tried to pickle a whole watermelon and it rotted in the back of their fridge for a month, her breath smells like IPA and dill, and he can feel the heat of her cheek close to his. He admits he’s been lonely, that he stopped going to any events where he might run into people who knew him from before the divorce because he was tired of being cast as the bad guy. She tucks a strand of gray-streaked auburn hair behind her ear, and her hand brushes his jaw when she pulls back, slow, deliberate, no apology. “I never thought you were the bad guy. Had a crush on you since I was 19, when I showed up to your house to borrow a surfboard and you were out there sanding it down in cutoff shorts. Never said anything, obviously. You were married.”
The thrill of it hums under his skin, the kind of quiet, forbidden rush he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager sneaking out to surf at dawn. He walks her to her beat-up 1998 Ford pickup when she says she has to go, helps her heft the crate of leftover jars into the bed. She hands him a full quart jar of pickled okra before she climbs into the driver’s seat, her phone number scrawled in thick black permanent marker on the white lid, right next to a tiny doodle of a pickle. He tucks the jar under his arm, stands on the curb until her taillights disappear around the corner by the fish market. The beer garden string lights are flickering on now, the air smells like fried fish and salt, and he twists the lid of the jar loose just enough to smell the brine, already counting the hours until he closes up his shop the next afternoon.
