Rafe Oliveira is 57, makes his living restoring antique maps out of a cinder block garage turned workshop in northeast Portland. His core flaw? He’s spent the last six years treating casual human interaction like a contagious rash, ever since his ex-wife left him for a tech millionaire who’d commissioned Rafe to restore a 16th century Mediterranean portolan chart as an anniversary gift for her. He only shows up to the neighborhood block party because his 82-year-old landlady, Mabel, corners him at his shop door at 4 p.m., holding a Tupperware of the peach cobbler he’s been begging her to make since last summer, and says if he bails she’ll raise his rent 20 percent.
He spends the first 45 minutes leaned against the side of Mabel’s picket fence, sipping a cheap lager and making a mental list of all the map repairs he could be knocking out right now. The air smells like charred hamburger patties, cut clover, and citronella candles that aren’t doing jack to keep the mosquitos off his forearms. Kids scream as they chase a golden retriever with a popsicle stuck to its fur, and a beat-up portable radio on the picnic table blasts old Travis Tritt tracks so loud the paper plates rattle. He’s just about to slip back to his shop when he reaches for a seltzer from the cooler at the exact same time as someone else.
Their hands brush first. His are calloused at the fingertips, crisscrossed with tiny faded cuts from razor blades and old parchment edges that split sharper than glass. Hers have a thin, silvery scar snaking across her wrist, her nails short and chipped, smudged with what looks like darkroom developer. He pulls his hand back like he touched a hot stove, and when he looks up, she’s holding the seltzer, grinning like she knows exactly how skittish he is.
She’s 49, goes by Jesse, she says, in town to help her mom move into the blue bungalow two doors down from his shop. She’s a wildlife photographer, spends most of her year camped in national parks or remote Alaskan fishing villages, chasing shots of grizzlies and sea lions and caribou herds. She says she drove past his shop three days earlier, stared at the 1890s nautical map of the Columbia River he has taped to the front window for 10 minutes, and had been trying to work up the nerve to knock ever since.
He doesn’t buy it at first. He’s had six years of practice assuming anyone who talks to him wants something for free, or wants to make fun of the weird guy who spends all day gluing old paper back together. He gives her one word answers at first, nods when she talks about a trip to Denali last spring, keeps his arms crossed over his chest, puts a good foot of space between them. But she doesn’t leave. She leans in when he mentions a 17th century map of the Amazon he’s currently restoring, closes that foot of space so her shoulder presses against his flannel shirt, and he can smell cedar and citrus and a faint hint of coconut from the leave-in conditioner in her wavy auburn hair.
She pulls her phone out to show him a photo of a water-damaged 1870s map of the Alaskan interior she picked up at a flea market in Fairbanks last winter, and when she tilts the screen toward him, her hair falls across his arm, soft as old silk. He finds himself leaning in too, pointing out the faded ink marks where surveyors marked uncharted riverbeds, telling her exactly how he’d fix the water stains without damaging the original paper. He doesn’t even notice when he drops his arms, doesn’t notice when they’re standing so close their hips bump every time one of them shifts their weight.
The sun dips below the rooflines around 8, the sky turning pink and tangerine, string lights strung between the maple trees flicker on. Most of the neighbors have packed up their coolers, dragged their kids to their cars, the radio turned down to a low murmur. Jesse tucks her phone back into her jeans pocket, and when she looks up at him, her eyes are dark in the low light, she doesn’t look away when he meets her gaze. She asks if he wants to come back to her mom’s house to look at the map in person, says she’ll even crack open that bottle of bourbon she brought back from Kentucky last fall.
His first instinct is to say no. He’s disgusted with the part of him that’s even considering it, that’s willing to risk the same humiliation he felt six years earlier when he walked into his kitchen and found his ex with that millionaire, the half-finished portolan chart spread out on the dining table between them. He rehearses the excuse about an early repair tomorrow, plans to go back to his quiet, empty shop, to sleep on the lumpy couch he’s been using since he sold the king sized bed he shared with his ex. He opens his mouth to say it, but then she brushes a fleck of sawdust off the front of his shirt, her fingers lingering on the fabric for half a second longer than necessary, and he can’t get the word out.
He nods instead. She grins, grabs the half-empty seltzer from the cooler, and starts walking down the sidewalk toward the blue bungalow, her boots tapping against the cracked concrete, crickets chirping loud in the grass along the curb. He falls into step next to her, his shoulder brushing hers every few steps, and for the first time in six years, he doesn’t feel the urge to pull away.
