Rafe Marquez, 58, retired air traffic controller, stood in the sweltering line for the weekly Pine Creek fish fry, sweat beading under the brim of his faded 2018 FAA cap. He’d spent 32 years juggling 60+ cross-country flights at a time from the Phoenix TRACON, making zero unscheduled choices on the clock, and that rigidity had leaked into the four years of retirement following his wife’s cancer death. The fish fry only came back six months prior, after two years of pandemic shutdowns, and he’d fallen into the routine the first week it reopened: he ate at the same picnic table every Friday, ordered the same two-piece catfish and hushpuppy combo, never spoke to anyone longer than the 10 seconds it took to pay the cashier. The only deviation he’d allowed all year was planting a row of marigolds by his back porch, and he’d planned that for three months first.
The line lurches forward without warning. A kid on a neon scooter swerves around a folding chair behind the woman standing in front of him, and she stumbles backward, her shoulder pressing firm into his sternum for half a beat before she catches herself. Her half-full iced tea sloshes over the rim, splattering a cold, sweet brown stain across the front of his gray work shirt. They both reach for the stack of paper napkins stuck to the side of the order counter at the same time, their knuckles brushing. Hers are cool from holding the plastic cup, calloused at the fingertips, and he yanks his hand back like he’s touched a live wire, old reflexes firing before he can think.
She turns, apologizing so fast her words run together, hazel eyes crinkling at the corners, sun-bleached streaks in her wavy brown hair sticking to the back of her neck. He recognizes her as Elara, the new part-time librarian who moved to town three months prior, the one who’d helped him track down a copy of the 1972 flight manual he’d been hunting for two weeks earlier. She offers to buy him a replacement soda to make up for the shirt, and his first instinct is to say no, to brush it off, to retreat to his empty table like he always does. Then he catches the faint smell of pine and lemon Pledge on her shirt, the same scent that clung to the old manual she’d pulled from the library’s archives, and he nods before he can overthink it.
They carry their plates to his usual oak-shaded table, and he sits on the bench opposite her, half expecting the discomfort to kick in, the familiar guilt of enjoying someone’s company that isn’t his late wife’s. Instead, they talk easy, no lulls. She restores tattered vintage children’s books on the side, she says, shows him a faint ink stain on her wrist from rebinding a copy of *Where the Wild Things Are* the night before. He tells her about the summer he spent as a teen washing planes at the small municipal airport outside Tucson, how he’d lied about his age to get the job. When a loud Toby Keith track blares from the speaker propped on the food truck roof, she leans in across the table to hear him better, her knee bumping his under the wood, warm through the denim of their jeans. He doesn’t move his leg away.
He mentions the box of his wife’s old picture books tucked in the back of his closet, the ones he couldn’t bring himself to donate or throw away, and her face lights up. She says she’d love to go through them, repair the ones with torn spines or missing pages, add them to the library’s free storytime stack for the town’s kids. The thought doesn’t make his chest ache like he thought it would. It makes it feel light, like the first time he’d ever sat in a small Cessna as a teen, the ground falling away under him, no checklists, no rules, just the wind on his face.
They finish their food as the sun dips low over the pine trees, the air cooling just enough to take the edge off the heat. She tears a scrap off a crumpled library checkout slip in her overalls pocket, scribbles her cell number on it in bright blue gel pen, and tucks it into the breast pocket of his work shirt, her fingers brushing the edge of the gray chest hair peeking out from his unbuttoned collar. She squeezes his wrist once, light, before she turns to walk to her beat up forest green Subaru parked at the edge of the lot.
Rafe stands there holding his half-eaten leftover hushpuppies in a crumpled foil wrapper, watching her car pull out onto the main road, the checkout slip crinkling under his fingers where he’s pressed his palm to his shirt pocket. For the first time in 30 years, he doesn’t run through a pros and cons list, doesn’t schedule a time three days from now to reach out, doesn’t overthink a single thing. He pulls his flip phone out of his jeans pocket, taps in the number one digit at a time, and hits call before the dust from her tires has settled on the gravel.
