Jax Marlow is 63, makes his living restoring vintage outboard motors out of the cinder block garage behind his ramshackle cabin on the edge of northern Wisconsin’s Turtle Lake. He’s got a scar running the length of his left forearm from a 1998 carburetor explosion, drinks only Pabst Blue Ribbon when he’s out, and hasn’t so much as held a woman’s hand since his wife, Gail, died of breast cancer eight years prior. His biggest flaw, if you ask the few people who know him well, is that he’d rather cut off his own thumb than give the town’s gossips something new to cluck about. He’s avoided every potluck, church bake sale, and neighborhood bonfire that didn’t involve selling a motor for half a decade, sticking only to the Friday night VFW fish fry where he could sit in his usual back corner booth, eat his cod in peace, and leave before anyone could corner him for small talk.
The first crack in that routine hits on a humid late August Friday, when the back booth is occupied by four 20-something construction guys in for a pipeline job, loud and drinking shots of Fireball. Jax stands in the entry for 10 seconds, weighing leaving and eating a frozen burrito at home alone, before a woman at the nearest shared Formica table waves him over. He recognizes her immediately: Elara Voss, 58, the new county extension agent who moved to town three months prior, divorced, drives a beat up Subaru with a “Protect Our Pollinators” bumper sticker, the subject of half a dozen snide comments he’d overheard at the grocery store from women who thought she dressed too casually for a “government job.”
He sits down across from her, mumbles a thanks, and stares hard at the paper placemat for three full minutes, avoiding eye contact, the smell of fried cod and vinegar and her lavender hand lotion mixing in the air so thick he can almost taste it. The jukebox in the corner hums Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” low enough that the words blur into the rattle of silverware and chatter around them, and the table is sticky under his elbows with old spilled soda. She passes him the tartar sauce first, their fingers brushing when he takes it, her nails short, chipped at the edges, with flecks of dark soil under the tips. “Was planting swamp milkweed by the lake all afternoon,” she says, like she can see him staring, and laughs, a low, rough sound that fits better than the high, tight laughs most of the town’s women use around strangers.
They talk slow, at first, him only answering her questions in one or two word bursts, until she mentions the 1957 Evinrude her dad left her when he died, that’s been sitting in her garage for 10 years, won’t turn over no matter what she does. Jax snorts before he can stop himself. “Bet you never drained the carb before you stored it,” he says, and she grins, leans forward across the table, her knee brushing his under the edge, warm through the worn denim of his work jeans. He tenses up for half a second, then doesn’t move away. “You gonna call me an idiot or you gonna come look at it tomorrow?” she asks.
He freezes. He can see Mrs. Henderson from the post office staring at them from the next table over, already mentally drafting the gossip she’ll spread at church on Sunday. The old part of him wants to say no, to make an excuse about a motor he has to finish for a client, to go back to his quiet garage and his old motors and no one bothering him. But then she tilts her head, holds his eye contact, no teasing smile now, just steady, like she knows exactly what he’s debating, and he feels a heat climb up his neck he hasn’t felt since he was 17 and asking Gail to prom.
He nods, and she scribbles her address on a crumpled napkin, shoves it across the table, her hand brushing his again when he takes it. He leaves 10 minutes later, the napkin crumpled in his front pocket, ignores Mrs. Henderson’s pointed stare when he walks past her table. His beer mug was cold enough that condensation dripped down his wrist the whole time they talked, and he can still feel the ghost of her knee against his when he gets in his truck to drive home.
He’s up at 6 the next morning, lays out his best set of carburetor tools, stops at the gas station for a pack of peppermint gum, brushes his teeth twice before he gets in his dented 2002 Ford F150. He pulls into her gravel drive 20 minutes later, and she’s waiting on the porch, holding two iced coffees, the Evinrude propped up on a wooden workbench next to the garage, sun glinting off its faded blue paint. He sets his toolbox on the ground next to the bench, takes the coffee when she holds it out, their fingers lingering this time, no accidental brush, just deliberate, warm, and he doesn’t look away when she smiles at him.
