Elias Marquez is 52, a custom fishing rod builder who’s run his 200-square-foot shop off the Newport, Oregon, boardwalk for 14 years. His biggest flaw? He’s worn “grumpy loner” like a faded, coffee-stained flannel since his wife left him for a commercial fisherman 8 years prior, so locked into his routine of 5 a.m. black coffee, 10 hour workdays sanding graphite blanks and wrapping guide lines, and solo weekend fishing trips he can’t remember the last time he held a conversation that didn’t revolve around rod action or chinook salmon runs. He’d only signed up for a booth at the annual spring seafood festival to unload a handful of overstock entry-level rods, fully planning to hide behind his display of cork handles and carbon fiber shafts and avoid small talk as much as humanly possible.
The first time she bumps into him, he’s mid-rant to himself about the festival’s $9 craft beer that tastes like sour citrus dish soap, hip knocking hard enough to make him fumble the unfinished cedar-wrapped rod he’d been sanding. She’s 48, a former ICU nurse who moved to town 6 months prior to sell small-batch hot sauce after burning out through two years of pandemic shifts, silver streaks cutting through her auburn hair tied back in a frayed Willie Nelson bandana, cedar and smoked chili clinging to her flannel shirt like a second skin. She holds eye contact for two full beats longer than polite, grinning when he huffs and brushes sawdust off his worn work jeans, no apology on her lips just a dry, smoky laugh as she says “Told the festival organizers this booth spacing was garbage. You’re lucky I wasn’t holding a jug of ghost pepper mash when I tripped over that loose board.” The smell of fried calamari from the booth behind them curls through the air between them, salty and greasy, and he can hear a group of kids screaming as they chase a seagull that stole a corn dog down the boardwalk.
He’s annoyed at first, mostly because her booth draws three times the foot traffic his does, groups of sunburnt tourists jostling past to sample her mango habanero and pineapple serrano blends, knocking over his stacked rod displays every 10 minutes. He finds himself watching her anyway, the way she tucks that same loose strand of hair behind her ear when she laughs at a customer’s bad fishing joke, the faint scar across her left knuckle from a medical equipment accident, the calluses on her hands from stirring 10-gallon pots of sauce over propane burners for hours at a time. When she passes him a sample cracker slathered in smoked jalapeno sauce an hour later, her fingers brushing his for half a second, he doesn’t pull away. The sauce burns going down, sharp and bright enough to make his eyes water, and he coughs so hard his ribs ache, making her snort loud enough to turn a few nearby heads. “Figured you needed something to cut through that permanently sour scowl,” she says, leaning against the edge of his booth close enough he can feel the heat of her arm through his thin work shirt, the sticky cotton candy residue on the table edge sticking to his elbow where he’s resting it.
The rain hits without warning, fat cold drops coming down so hard they drown out the steel drum band playing three booths down, every vendor scrambling to cover their stock before it gets waterlogged or broken. Eli grabs the heavy vinyl tarp he keeps stashed under his table for impromptu rain delays on his fishing boat, throwing it over both his rod display and her shelves of glass sauce jars before he even thinks about it, yanking her under it with one calloused hand on her elbow when she tries to run for her car. They huddle close for 12 minutes, rain drumming so loud on the tarp they have to lean in to hear each other, shoulders pressed tight, her cheek almost brushing his when she leans in to yell over the downpour that she’s been trying to work up the nerve to talk to him for weeks. She’s seen him loading his aluminum fishing boat at the ramp every Saturday morning, she says, has stood there waving half a dozen times and he never even glanced her way, too focused on his tackle box or his thermos of coffee to notice.
He’s so shocked he forgets to pretend he’s annoyed for a full 10 seconds. He’d been so wrapped up in his own head, so determined to keep everyone at arm’s length to avoid getting hurt again, he’d missed it entirely. When the rain lets up, the sun breaking through the clouds to paint the ocean a soft, glowing pink along the horizon, they pack up their booths together, him carrying her heavy wooden crates of sauce jars to her beat-up forest green Subaru, her slipping him a free 4-ounce jar of her limited-edition habanero lime blend as a thank you, scrawled with a messy phone number on the side in sharpie. He tells her he’s heading out to fish for lingcod Saturday at 6 a.m., brings extra waterproof rain gear and a cooler full of cold IPA, if she wants to come. She grins, that same sharp, bright grin that made his chest feel tight earlier, says she’ll bring the sauce for post-fish tacos, no sour cream required, and she’ll even let him pick the music on the boat.
He watches her pull out of the parking lot, waving out the driver’s side window, and for the first time in 8 years, he finds himself counting down the hours until the weekend.
