Javi Ruiz is 59, spent 28 years as an air traffic controller in Jacksonville before he retired and bought the scruffy little bait and tackle shop off the coastal highway outside Brunswick, Georgia. He’s got a scar snaking up his left forearm from a reel that snapped back on him last spring, and a habit of leaving every community event 20 minutes after he shows up, convinced everyone around him is just waiting for an opening to ask when he’ll “get back out there” after his wife’s death 8 years prior. He only agreed to bring his custom welded crab steam pot to the annual fire department oyster roast because his 17-year-old nephew begged, said the old pot the department owned rusted through over the summer.
The air smells like wood smoke, brine, and charred garlic butter when he leans against the tailgate of his beat-up 2007 Silverado, plastic cup of light beer sweating in his hand, already mentally running through the list of reels he needs to repair back at the shop before sunrise. He’s just about to push off the truck and leave when a woman trips over the cinder block holding down the tent line three feet away, sloshing a full cup of sweet tea straight down the front of his navy flannel shirt. She grabs his bicep hard to steady herself, ringless left hand cold through the thin wet fabric, and when he looks down he catches the flash of hazel eyes flecked with gold, her breath carrying the sharp sweet tang of peppermint and roasted sweet potato.
He’s irritated for half a second, ready to brush her off and head for the truck, before she laughs, a low scratchy sound that reminds him of the Tom Petty bootlegs he plays in the shop on slow Saturdays. “Jesus, I am so sorry,” she says, swiping at the wet spot on his shirt with a crumpled napkin, her knuckles brushing his stomach by accident. “I swear I’ve tripped over every cinder block in this county since I moved here in June.”
He recognizes her then, sort of. Elara, the new county librarian, 52, he’s seen her beat-up Subaru parked outside the tiny library downtown a handful of times, but he hasn’t stepped foot in that building since his wife used to bring him there for their weekly book swap dates, so he’s never talked to her. Part of him tenses up, waiting for the inevitable question about his wife, the little sympathetic head tilt, the quiet offer to set him up with her cousin who’s also widowed, but it never comes. She offers to buy him another beer to make up for the shirt, mentions she bought a secondhand surf rod from his shop last month for her grandson who visits from Columbus every other weekend, says the kid caught a 3-pound redfish on it two weeks back.
They lean against the tailgate together for the next 45 minutes, their shoulders brushing every time a group of people walks past to grab oysters off the metal tables. She tells him she restores torn paperback romance novels in her spare time, gluing spines back together and pressing loose pages between heavy cast-iron weights, and he tells her about the collection of 1960s fishing reels he’s been restoring in the back room of the shop, the one he never shows anyone. A group of his wife’s old bridge club friends walk past, staring, and Javi’s jaw tightens, ready to step away, to make up some excuse about having to get back to the shop before anyone can say anything. Elara just nods at the group, casual as anything, says “nice evening, isn’t it?” before turning back to him, her fingers brushing the side of his wrist lightly when she points out a heron gliding over the marsh behind the tent line. “You don’t owe anyone an explanation for enjoying yourself, you know,” she says, quiet enough that no one else can hear.
The knot that’s been sitting in his chest for 8 years loosens, just a little. He hasn’t felt this light, this unobserved, since before his wife got sick. He reaches for the last two charred oysters sitting on the tin tray propped on the tailgate, hands her one, the rough ridged shell scraping against her palm when she takes it. The sun dips below the marsh, painting the Spanish moss hanging from the oak trees pink and tangerine, the bluegrass band’s fiddle playing slow and soft in the background.
He asks her if she wants to come back to the shop with him, says he’s got a first-edition copy of *The Old Man and the Sea* he spent three months restoring last winter, he can show her the leather binding he hand-stitched himself. She grins, popping the oyster into her mouth, wiping the salt off her chin with the back of her hand. She says yes. He walks around the truck, pulls open the passenger door for her, the cold metal of the handle biting into his palm through his still damp shirt.
