Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living restoring vintage snowmobiles out of a cinder block shop behind his cabin outside Grand Marais, Minnesota. He’s got a permanent smudge of grease under his left fingernail that hasn’t washed out in three years, and a flaw he won’t admit out loud: he’s avoided any interaction that could lead to romance since his wife left for a Tampa real estate developer eight years prior, convinced his grease-stained flannels, 8 p.m. bedtimes, and habit of rambling about 1970s Ski-Doo engine specs make him unfit for anything more than casual small talk with the guys at the local VFW.
The VFW’s Friday night fish fry is the only non-work activity he shows up to like clockwork. The air always smells like fried cod, cheap draft beer, and 40 years of cigarette smoke trapped in the drop ceiling tiles, and the cod is crispy enough to crunch when you bite into it, dipped in tartar sauce loaded with extra dill just how he likes it. This particular Friday, the place is packed, a spillover crowd from the local high school hockey team’s upset win down the street, so when the woman in the forest service green parka slides into the booth across from him, he doesn’t even look up from his plate at first.
Her parka sleeve brushes his bicep as she settles in, cold enough to send a shiver through his worn flannel, and he catches a whiff of pine and peppermint lip balm. “Sorry,” she says, wiping clods of mud off her steel-toe work boots onto the leg of her faded jeans. “Every other seat’s taken, and I’ve been clearing downed trees since 6 a.m. I’d eat standing up if my knees didn’t feel like they’re full of gravel.”
Manny grunts, stabs a piece of cod with his plastic fork. He’s got a built-in grudge against forest service staff; they’ve ticketed him twice for off-trail riding in the Superior National Forest, even the time he was chasing a stray golden retriever that’d run onto restricted ground to avoid an oncoming plow. He’s halfway to making up an excuse to leave when she laughs at a dumb joke the bartender yells across the room, loud and rough, no high-pitched fake lilt like his ex used to pull out at stuffy dinner parties, and he glances up. Her eyes are the exact same bright, icy blue as the 1972 Ski-Doo T’NT he’d finished restoring two weeks prior, and there’s a thin scar across her left cheekbone, like she took a tree branch to the face at some point.
“Got a ticket last month for off-trail,” he says before he can stop himself. “Guy in a forest service truck just like yours wrote me up for $180, didn’t even let me explain I was going after a lost dog.”
She snorts, sipping her root beer from a dented plastic cup. “That was my partner Jake. He’s got a stick so far up his ass he can taste pine sap. I saw you that day, for the record. Would’ve let you off. Jake just likes bossing around anyone who looks like they’d rather be on a sled than in an office filling out reports.”
The tension he didn’t know he was holding in his shoulders loosens a little. They talk for 45 minutes, him rambling about the half-dozen sleds he’s got torn apart in his shop, her telling stories about rescuing drunk hikers who get lost off the trail in the summer and snowmobilers who think they can outrun blizzards. He reaches for the ketchup bottle at the same time she does, their knuckles brushing, his calloused from years of turning wrenches, hers scraped raw from hauling oak branches, and a jolt runs up his arm that he hasn’t felt since his first date with his ex, back when they were 22. He’s torn, half of him wanting to lean in closer, half of him screaming that he’s too old, too rough, too set in his ways to mess with this, that she’s probably 15 years younger than him and would never be interested in a guy who spends most of his time covered in two-stroke oil.
When she goes to stand up to leave, her boot catches on a puddle of spilled beer under the table, and she stumbles forward. He reaches out without thinking, his hand wrapping around her waist to steady her, and she leans into his chest for half a second, their faces six inches apart, and he can taste the root beer on her breath when she huffs a surprised laugh. For a beat, neither of them moves.
“Hey,” she says, once she’s steady on her feet, tucking a strand of wind-tousled brown hair behind her ear. “We found an old snowmobile abandoned in a remote cabin up near the Canadian border last week, looks like it’s from the early 70s. I don’t know a damn thing about vintage sleds. You wanna come take a look at it with me Saturday? I’ll bring coffee strong enough to strip paint, and I won’t ticket you for driving off-trail to get there.”
Manny blinks, then nods before he can overthink it. She scrawls her number on a napkin with a chewed-up ballpoint pen, shoves it into the breast pocket of his flannel, and heads for the door, waving over her shoulder. He sits there for another 10 minutes, staring at the crumpled napkin sticking out of his pocket, finishing his beer, and realizes he hasn’t felt this light since before his wife sat him down at the kitchen table and told him she was leaving.
He wipes a smudge of tartar sauce off his flannel sleeve, already mentally packing his wrench roll for the trip.
