Elias Voss, 52, makes his living restoring vintage fishing reels out of a converted two-car garage behind his cottage in coastal Maine. He’s avoided anything resembling casual socializing outside of mandatory family holidays since his divorce eight years prior, convinced all it leads to is overcomplicated arguments and unmet expectations, so his weekly trip to the VFW fish fry is the only time he leaves his property for non-work reasons most weeks. He sits at the same scuffed Formica table in the back corner every Friday, eats his fried cod and coleslaw in silence, listens to the jukebox spin Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash records, and leaves exactly 45 minutes after he arrives, no exceptions.
The Friday in mid-May starts the same way. The air inside the hall smells like hot grease and lemon dish soap, the linoleum sticks a little to the soles of his scuffed work boots, and the old guys at the next table are arguing about last week’s town council vote to ban single-use plastic bags. He’s halfway through his coleslaw when a shadow falls across the empty seat across from him. He looks up, sees the new town librarian hovering there, holding a paper plate stacked high with cod and a can of root beer. He’s seen her around town before, heard the quiet gossip from the more conservative crowd—she moved here from Boston three months prior after her husband died of a heart attack, turned down the local pastor’s invitation to join the church council, has a “Protect Our Atlantic Fisheries” bumper sticker on her beat-up Subaru that half the town has complained about. All the other tables are full, so he mumbles that the seat is free, fully expecting her to eat as fast as possible and bolt without a word.
She sits down, and when she reaches across the table to grab the ketchup bottle between them, her forearm brushes his. He feels the soft wear of her faded denim jacket, the warmth of her skin through the thin fabric, and freezes. He hasn’t been touched by anyone who isn’t his sister hugging him at Christmas in almost three years. He’s annoyed at first, ready to make some half-assed excuse to leave early, until he sees her eyes flick to the sticker on his lunch pail: a graphic of a 1963 Penn Spinfisher, the exact reel he’s been picking apart for a customer for the last two weeks. “My dad had that exact reel,” she says, wiping a smudge of blue ink off her wrist with the back of her hand. “Taught me to fish off the Cape Ann docks with it when I was seven. I dropped it in the ocean a year later and cried so hard my mom bought me an ice cream cone just to shut me up.”
He laughs before he can stop himself. They talk for an hour, and he doesn’t check his watch once, doesn’t make up an excuse to leave. She tells him about the group of teen girls who come into the library after school to write poetry, about the way she hikes the coastal trails every weekend to look for sea glass. He tells her about the customer who brought in a reel so rusted it was basically a paperweight, about the way he still has the first reel his dad ever gave him, sitting on a shelf above his workbench. When she leans forward to tell him about the time she found a piece of sea glass that was the exact shade of her mom’s old cocktail ring, her knee brushes his under the table. She doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t either. Her eyes are hazel, flecked with gold, and she bites the corner of her lower lip when she’s listening, like she’s hanging on every word he says. He feels that low, warm hum in his chest he’d forgotten existed, half desire half relief, and fights the urge to beat himself up for caring what the old guys at the next table might think about him talking to the “liberal new librarian.”
By the time the volunteers start stacking folding chairs and wiping down the tables, the sun is dipping low over the ocean, painting the sky pink and orange. He walks her to her Subaru, the cool spring air nipping at his cheeks, and pauses before she opens the driver’s side door. He tells her he has that 1963 Penn Spinfisher half restored in his shop right now, asks if she wants to come by tomorrow to see it, maybe stop for coffee on the way. She grins, pulls a crumpled library checkout slip out of her jacket pocket, scrawls her number on the back of it. When she passes it to him, her fingers brush his, and the blue ink from her wrist smudges a little on the edge of the paper. He tucks the slip into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, watches her taillights fade down the dirt road, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel the urge to overthink every single thing that just happened.
