Rafe Mendez, 53, makes his living shaping custom fly rods out of a converted garage behind his cabin outside Asheville, North Carolina. He’s stubborn to a fault, has held a grudge against his ex-wife for 12 years straight, and hasn’t attended a single local community event in the 11 years he’s lived in the county, unless you count stopping at the general store for beer and beef jerky. The only reason he showed up to the fire department’s annual fish fry fundraiser was because the retired chief, his oldest regular customer, threatened to stop commissioning rods for his grandkids if Rafe bailed again.
The air reeks of fried catfish grease, hushpuppy batter, and pine drifting down from the ridge above the fairground. A bluegrass trio picks a fast tune off to the side, their fiddle sawing loud enough to drown out half the conversations at the picnic tables. Rafe hangs by the drink cooler, holding a sweating styrofoam cup of sweet tea, and is halfway to sneaking out early when he spots her walking toward him.
It’s Maeve Carter, his ex-wife’s younger cousin. The last time he saw her, she was 20 years old, chewing bubble gum and crashing his wedding reception to steal a slice of cake before she ran off to college in Oregon. Now she’s 48, recently widowed, moved back to the area six months prior to run her mom’s flower shop. She stops so close the hem of her linen work shirt, dusted with peony pollen, brushes the toe of his scuffed work boot. She smells like lavender cut with the sharp, sweet tang of fried onion, and her hazel eyes are the same shade as his ex’s, but soft, no sharp, judgmental edge behind them.
She reaches past him to grab a root beer from the cooler, and her bare forearm brushes his. His skin is crisscrossed with tiny cuts from carving rod blanks, calloused along the palm from wrapping grip after grip with sinew. Hers is soft, dotted with freckles from working outside in the flower beds, and the contact sends a warm jolt up his arm that he definitely didn’t expect. He flinches first, half out of habit, half because the part of his brain that’s spent 12 years associating anything tied to his ex with anger is screaming that this is wrong, that he should turn and walk away. The other part of him can’t stop staring at the way the sun catches the silver strands in her auburn braid, the way she blows a bubble with her gum just like she did when she was 20, popping it loud when she laughs at his dumb joke about the time his ex burned their wedding cake.
She admits she talked the fire chief into strong-arming Rafe into coming. She’d seen his name on the list of local donors, knew he’d not show up unless someone twisted his arm, and she’d wanted to see him again. She’d always thought her cousin treated him like garbage, that he deserved better than the messy public divorce that left him packing his truck in the middle of the night. The admission hangs between them for a second, thick enough to cut with a knife, and Rafe can feel his face heating up, something he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager asking a girl to prom.
When the auction starts up, the first lot up for bid is a half-day guided fly fishing trip on the Tuckasegee River, gear and lunch included. Rafe bids without thinking, when a local real estate agent bids higher, he goes up another 20 bucks, keeps going until he wins, even though he knows the river better than any guide within 100 miles. Maeve walks over to hand him the printed certificate a few minutes later, and their fingers brush when he takes it from her. She leans in close, her shoulder pressed to his so she can talk over the crowd yelling for the next auction lot, and whispers that she’s the guide, if that’s okay with him. No pressure, she says, they can just fish, not even talk, if that’s what he wants.
He says it’s more than okay. They sit together at a picnic table for the rest of the fry, share a plate of hushpuppies, she steals three bites of his coleslaw even though she has her own, their knees brushing under the table the whole time. When he leaves an hour later, she hugs him quick, her hair brushing his jaw, and he doesn’t pull away, even when a few of the old firemen holler and wolf whistle from the next table over. He drives back to his cabin, stops in his workshop to set the auction certificate on his workbench next to the half-finished rod he’s been carving for himself for the last three months, pops the top on a cold beer, and watches a moth bounce off the overhead work light for a full minute before the corner of his mouth tugs up into a small, unplanned smile.
