Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 38 years hauling salmon out of the Columbia River before a torn rotator cuff forced him to dock his boat for good. These days he runs a 10-person smoked salmon operation out of his garage, and he’s stubborn as a mule about letting anyone new into his routine—his kids have been nagging him to sign up for a senior dating app for two years, and he’s laughed every single time, convinced any romantic connection after his wife Ellen’s 2015 passing would be a betrayal. He’s manning his booth at the Astoria summer street fair when he first notices her, the botanical illustrator set up 18 inches to his left, selling prints of native Pacific Northwest fungi and wildflowers.
The July sun hangs low and thick over the river, turning the air sticky with salt and fried Oreo fumes from the food truck down the block. He’s wiping sweat off his brow with the back of a paper towel when she leans across the shared booth edge, reaching for a sample slice of his maple-cured salmon he set out an hour earlier. Their hands brush when he passes her a toothpick, and he jolts a little—her skin is cool, smudged with forest-green watercolor on the knuckle, a thin callus along the side of her index finger from holding paintbrushes for hours. She holds eye contact for three beats longer than polite, grinning, and says she’s been smelling his smoke pit all morning, she’d been this close to ditching her entire booth line to sneak a sample 20 minutes earlier.
He can’t remember the last time he talked to a woman he wasn’t related to for more than two minutes, but he finds himself leaning in anyway, his boots propped on the hay bale at his feet, ignoring the customers waving at him from the other side of his booth for a full 10 seconds. He smells lavender and pine from her hand lotion when she leans closer to ask how he gets the smoke flavor so even, hears the faint scratch of her paintbrush when she touches up a chanterelle print between her own customers. He rubs the scar on his left forearm, the one he got when a winch snapped on his boat in 2001, the whole time he’s talking, fighting the stupid, bubbling guilt in his chest like he’s doing something wrong just by laughing at her joke about the terrible cover band playing Fleetwood Mac covers 100 feet away.
The crowds thin out as the sun dips below the Astoria-Megler Bridge, the street lights flicker on, and the fair closes up at 9. He’s packing his coolers of leftover salmon into the back of his pickup when a kid on a skateboard zooms past, slamming into her stack of unframed prints. She stumbles backward, and he lunges to catch her, his hand wrapping around her waist through her thin linen button-down. Their faces are six inches apart, he can taste the iced peach tea she was sipping all afternoon on her breath, feel the steady thud of her heartbeat through her shirt, and neither of them pulls away for three full seconds.
He admits it before he can think better of it, that he’s been beating himself up all day for even talking to her, that he thought he’d locked that part of himself away when Ellen died. She nods, twists the thin silver wedding band she still wears on her right hand, and says she gets it—her husband passed five years earlier, she spent three years sleeping in his old flannel shirts and refusing to go to any of the art shows she used to love, convinced having fun without him was cheating.
He grabs a jar of his special whiskey-cured salmon from the last cooler, scribbles his cell number on the lid with a Sharpie, and tells her if she’s ever passing through Astoria again, he’s got a front porch with a view of the river that’s perfect for drinking cheap beer at sunset, and a freezer full of every salmon cure he’s ever invented. She laughs, tucks a strand of silver-streaked hair behind her ear, pulls a framed print of a cluster of golden chanterelles from her stack, and writes her number on the back, says if he ever feels like driving three hours up to the Olympic Peninsula, she knows a hidden cove where the salmon run so thick you can almost catch them with your bare hands, and the sunsets make the Astoria sky look dull.
He watches her load her prints into her beat-up forest-green Subaru, waves as she pulls out of the parking lot, honking once out the window. He tucks the print under his arm, unlocks his pickup, and pulls out his phone to text his oldest kid he’s got a date next weekend, if they want to help him pick out a new flannel that doesn’t have salmon grease stains on the cuff.
