Rudy Galvan, 52, has made a living restoring vintage fishing lures out of his coastal Oregon garage for the last 17 years. His workbench is perpetually caked in epoxy and iridescent paint flecks, his left forearm bears a pale, jagged scar from a 16-year-old fishing accident with a barbed steelhead hook, and he’s avoided anything resembling romantic interest since his wife packed her bags and moved to Arizona eight years prior. He’d convinced himself all post-50 dating was nothing but stilted small talk over chain restaurant pasta, tedious negotiations about who left the TV on too loud, and awkward disclosures about joint pain and prescription copays. The most social he gets is the weekly VFW fish fry every Friday, where he eats two pieces of beer-battered cod, a side of coleslaw, and sits in the back booth alone so he doesn’t have to field questions from his old Navy buddies about why he’s still single.
He’s in line for a second hushpuppy when he turns too fast, his elbow catching the plastic iced tea cup in the hands of the woman he’s been avoiding making eye contact with for three months. The cold, sweet tea sloshes over the rim, soaking the cuff of his flannel and dribbling down his scarred forearm. She yelps a quiet apology, grabs a fistful of paper napkins from the stack by the condiment table, and dabs at the wet spot on his wrist before he can protest. Her fingers are calloused at the tips, from turning book pages and splitting firewood for the small cabin she rents on the edge of town, he later learns, and the light pressure of them against his scar makes his ears go hot. She’s Maren, the new county librarian, the one he’s been dropping off stacks of old outdoor and fishing books for every few weeks for the kids’ summer reading program. He’d been avoiding her because the guys at the VFW had started teasing him about his “little librarian crush” the second she first showed up to the fish fry two months prior, and he hated the idea of the entire town gossiping about him like he was a 16-year-old asking a girl to prom.
She holds his eye contact for two beats longer than casual interaction requires, a half-smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, and says she recognizes his beat up Ford F150 with the lure decal on the back window from the library parking lot. He stammers out a response, half apology for bumping her, half ramble about the 1947 Heddon Dowagiac he’d spent all morning restoring, and is halfway convinced he sounds like an idiot when she nods, asks a follow up question about how he matches the original paint on 70-year-old lures, and says she’s been meaning to ask him if he knows any good spots for shore fishing around the area. She’d moved to town six months prior from Minneapolis, she says, and hadn’t had a chance to explore the coast beyond the library and the grocery store.
The psychological whiplash is enough to make him dizzy: one half of him is disgusted that he’s acting like a giddy teen, overthinking every accidental brush of her hand, every smile, convinced the whole VFW is staring at them and whispering. The other half of him is warm, lighter than he’s felt in years, like he’s forgotten what it’s like to talk to someone who doesn’t dismiss his weird, niche job, who thinks his stories about finding old lures in abandoned cabins are interesting, not tedious.
When the band launches into a slow dance track, she tugs at his wrist, nods toward the small open space by the stage, and asks him to dance. He protests, says he hasn’t danced since his wedding, says he’s terrible, will step on her feet, but she just grins, tugs harder, and says she doesn’t care if he steps on her toes. He lets her pull him up, his hand resting light on her waist, the other holding her calloused hand, and they sway slow, so close her temple brushes his jaw when she turns her head to laugh at a guy in a Navy ball cap who’s doing a terrible two-step across the floor. He admits he’s had a stupid little crush on her for months, was too much of a coward to say anything because he didn’t want the whole town talking about him. She laughs, soft, the sound vibrating against his chest, and says she’s been leaving an extra cup of black coffee out for him at the library front desk every time she sees his truck pull up, had been waiting for him to make the first move.
They leave the fish fry an hour early, drive up to the overlook above the bay, and sit on the hood of his F150, sharing a pack of peanut M&Ms he keeps stashed in his center console for long fishing trips. The ocean breeze is cold, salty, and he slips his flannel off, drapes it over her shoulders when she shivers. He asks her if she wants to go out on his 14-foot aluminum boat at low tide the next morning, says the spot prawns are running, says he’ll even teach her how to cast if she wants. She says yes, leans in, kisses him slow, the salt from the ocean air on her lips, the faint taste of sweet tea on her tongue. He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out the tiny hand-painted minnow lure he’d stashed there two weeks prior to give her, and tucks it behind her ear.
