Rudy Galvan is 52, makes his living restoring antique maps for private collectors and small maritime museums out of the converted front porch of his coastal Oregon cottage. He hasn’t enjoyed a public town event since his wife Ellen passed eight years prior, usually avoids them entirely, but the local historical society begged him to show up to the summer food truck rally to appraise a 1932 coastal navigation map someone donated for the charity raffle. He’d agreed only because they offered to cover the cost of the acid-free archival paper he’d been saving up for three months. He’s standing off to the side, sipping a lukewarm, flat IPA he grabbed from the beer tent, counting the minutes until he can slip out and go back to his quiet cottage, when it happens.
The air smells like grilled elote slathered in cotija cheese, fried Oreos, and salt off the nearby Pacific, gritty sand tucked into the laces of his scuffed work boots. A woman carrying a tray of shaved ice samples trips over a cinder block holding down a taco truck’s tent line, slams full force into his chest. Mango syrup and slush drip down the front of his faded navy Carhartt, the one Ellen bought him for their 20th anniversary, the one he refuses to replace no matter how many stains it gets. He huffs, ready to snap, until he looks down and sees her face. It’s Lila Marquez, his daughter’s childhood best friend, the kid who used to camp out on his workshop floor for hours asking questions about old ship routes and buried treasure, who left town the day after she graduated high school and hadn’t been back until last month, he’d heard, to take care of her mom who was undergoing treatment for stage two breast cancer. She’s 38 now, sun-streaked blonde hair pulled back in a messy braid strung with tiny blue shell beads, coconut sunscreen drifting off her skin, a smudge of bright red chamoy on her left cheek. She’s laughing so hard she snorts, dabbing at the sticky stain on his jacket with a crumpled paper napkin, her warm hand brushing his stomach through the thick Carhartt fabric again and again like she doesn’t even notice. “Oh my god, Rudy, I am so sorry,” she says, grinning, and her voice is still the same bright, crackly thing he remembers from when she was 14 and sneaking sips of his beer when Ellen wasn’t looking.
He freezes, first with sharp, familiar annoyance at having his personal space invaded, then with a sharp, unnameable heat that curls low in his gut, fast and unbidden. It’s wrong, he tells himself instantly. He knew her when she was still carrying a My Little Pony backpack and begging his daughter for sleepovers. The town will talk, gossip spreads faster here than wildfire in August, half the people here already know everyone else’s business before they do themselves. He should step back, thank her for the apology, tell her it’s fine, go back to counting down the minutes until he can leave. But he doesn’t. He leans in a little, just enough to catch the faint smell of jasmine perfume under the sunscreen and mango, the briny ocean air tangled in her hair. “You still running around causing trouble?” he says, and he’s surprised by how light his own voice sounds, like he hasn’t spoken to anyone who isn’t a client or a cashier at the hardware store in months, which he mostly hasn’t. She steps closer, shoulder pressing warm to his when a group of screaming kids sprint past, chasing a runaway neon beach ball. “Only the good kind,” she says, and her eyes are dark, warm, holding his gaze longer than she needs to, no trace of the shy kid he remembers. She asks if he still keeps the jar of sour lemon drops on the corner of his workbench, the ones with the grainy sugar coating he used to slip to her and his daughter when they snuck into his shop after school. He says he does, still refills it every week. She asks if he ever found the 1927 map of the Tillamook Head shipwrecks he was hunting for back then, the one with the hand-drawn X’s where sailors swore a cargo of Spanish gold was buried. He says he scored a tattered copy at an estate sale last month, just finished restoring it for a museum in Astoria.
The guilt nags at him again, sharp and hot, when she tilts her head up to look at him, so close he can count the freckles across her nose, the tiny scar above her left eyebrow from when she fell off his daughter’s bike when they were 12. He tells himself he’s nearly old enough to be her dad, that people are already glancing over, that Ellen would roll her eyes so hard she’d sprain something if she saw him standing here flirting with a woman he’d watched grow up. But then she tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, her thumb brushing his bare wrist when she hands him a free cup of shaved ice, mango with extra chamoy, just how she remembers he likes it. “I’ve been dying to see your shop again,” she says, quiet enough only he can hear, over the twang of the country band playing on the small stage nearby, the crackle of a deep fryer from the food truck behind them. “No pressure. I just miss being around things that feel like they have a story.” He hesitates for half a second, the voice in his head screaming that this is a bad idea, then nods. “I’m there tomorrow at 2,” he says. “Door’ll be unlocked.”
She grins, waves, and turns to walk back to her shaved ice booth, her cutoff denim shorts riding up a little as she steps over a loose patch of crabgrass. Halfway there, she looks over her shoulder and winks at him. He takes a bite of the shaved ice, the sour chamoy stinging the tip of his tongue, the cold seeping through the paper cup into his palm, and he doesn’t even bother wiping the sticky syrup off the front of his jacket.
