Elroy Voss, 62, retired commercial marine mechanic, spent 38 years fixing everything from 12-foot skiffs to 80-foot shrimp trawlers out of his cinder block shop on Murrells Inlet. His biggest flaw, one he’d refused to admit existed until that October evening, was that he’d shut himself off from every community gathering for four years straight, ever since his wife Maggie died of ovarian cancer. He’d turned down invitations to fish fries, birthday cookouts, even his own grandson’s little league games, convinced everyone who spoke to him only did so out of pity, not because they actually wanted him around. He’d skipped the annual Hale’s Oyster Farm fall roast three years running, too, until his old shop hand Tommy showed up at his garage at 2 PM that day, threatened to hide all the parts for the 1972 Boston Whaler he was restoring, and all but dragged him to the event.
The air smelled like oak smoke, steamed oysters, and vinegar-based hot sauce, thick and sweet in the damp lowcountry air. Crunched oyster shells ground under the tread of his grease-stained work boots as he made his way to the edge of the crowd, leaning up against a splintered pine post half-buried in the sand. He picked meat out of an oyster shell with a rusted pocket knife, half-drunk can of Pabst in his other hand, already mapping his escape route back to his cottage when he felt a sharp nudge to his ribs.
He turned, and it was Marnie Hale, 38, the youngest Hale kid, who he hadn’t seen since she moved to Oregon for a fisheries job six years prior. She had her neoprene waders rolled down to her ankles, caked with black marsh mud from that morning’s harvest, a faded 90s Alice in Chains tee stretched tight across sun-darkened shoulders, a braid slung over one shoulder with a piece of spartina grass sticking out of the end. She smelled like saltwater, cedar, and the sriracha she’d been dousing on every oyster she shucked all day.
“Thought I recognized that grumpy scowl,” she said, holding out a hand for his beer. When he passed it to her their fingers brushed, and he felt the thick callus across her middle knuckle from prying open oyster shells for 12 hours straight, the rough scrape of it against the soft skin of his own knuckle, and he had to stop himself from flinching like he’d been burned. She took a long sip, wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist, and held his gaze for two beats longer than polite, a small smirk playing at the corner of her mouth. “Tommy said he had to threaten to hide your Whaler parts to get you here. Maggie would’ve whooped your ass for skipping three roasts in a row, you know that.”
He huffed a laugh, shifted his weight, and stepped back half a foot like he was putting distance between himself and the weird, warm hum crawling up his spine. He’d known her since she was 11, showing up at his shop with chocolate chip cookies when he fixed her dad’s trawler after Hurricane Hugo, helping him sort spark plugs on slow summer days when she was supposed to be doing algebra homework. It felt wrong to notice the freckles across her nose, the way her forearms were corded with muscle from hauling 50-pound oyster sacks, the way her smile made the corners of her eyes crinkle the same way Maggie’s used to. He tried to mumble something about not feeling like crowds, tripped over a half-buried oyster shell, and she grabbed his forearm to steady him, her palm warm and firm through the thin fabric of his worn gray flannel, and she didn’t let go for a full three seconds, her thumb brushing the faint scar on his wrist he got from a propeller accident back in 2009.
They ended up talking for an hour, leaned up against that same pine post, the crowd thinning out around them as people loaded up coolers and hauled folding chairs back to their trucks. She told him she’d moved back three months prior, after her dad had a stroke, to take over running the oyster farm, that she’d found his old 18-piece wrench set in the back of her dad’s shop last week, the one he left there when he fixed the farm’s harvest boat in 2014, and offered to drop it off at his place on her way home. He offered to drive her to get it, said he didn’t mind the trip, but she shook her head, said she already had the wrench set in the back of her truck, along with a jar of pickled okra she canned using Maggie’s old recipe, the one she’d gotten from Maggie right before she moved west.
The walk to his cottage was 10 minutes down a dirt road lined with live oaks strung with Spanish moss, the moon bright enough to cast long, soft shadows across the sand, the sound of crickets and the faint gurgle of the marsh following them the whole way. She carried the wrench set in one hand, the jar of okra in the other, and when they got to his porch steps she set both down on the weathered cedar wood, reached up to brush a fleck of oyster shell off his cheek, her thumb grazing the gray stubble along his jawline. He didn’t pull away.
“I always thought you were the best guy on this whole inlet,” she said, soft, so quiet he almost didn’t hear it over the sound of the wind in the oaks. “Even when I was a kid, I thought if I ever found someone as steady as you, I’d hold onto them.”
He didn’t say anything at first, too busy letting that sink in, letting the last four years of loneliness and self-pity and guilt for even thinking about another woman melt away. He leaned down, kissed her slow, and she tasted like beer and sriracha and salt, and when she kissed him back he didn’t feel like a widower, or an old guy who used to fix boats, he felt like Elroy, for the first time in a long time.
They went inside, she hung her waders by the front door next to his scuffed rubber rain boots, he set the jar of okra on the kitchen counter next to the framed photo of him and Maggie on their 35th wedding anniversary, carried the wrench set out to the garage to put it next to his other tools. He came back in, she was sitting on his couch, kicking her work boots off, already reaching for the TV remote to put on the Alabama football game he’d been planning on watching alone later.
He reached for the string to turn off the porch light, and for the first time in four years, he didn’t mind the quiet coming after the noise of the crowd.
