Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 28 years manning the Cape Meares lighthouse before he retired three years prior, right after his wife of 37 years passed from ovarian cancer. His biggest flaw, per his only niece, is that he’d rather talk to the seagulls that perch on his cottage porch rail than any human within a 10 mile radius, and he’d spent the last 40 minutes leaning against the side of a smoked brisket truck trying to figure out how to slip out of the town’s annual summer block party without his niece noticing. The beer in his hand was warm, the bluegrass band three booths over was playing too loud, and he’d already turned down three separate invitations to play cornhole from guys he’d gone to high school with.
He was just about to toss his half-empty lemon shandy in a nearby trash can and cut through the side alley when his hand brushed someone else’s reaching for the last pulled pork slider on the tray set out on the truck’s counter. The other hand was cool, knuckles dusted with faint smudges of royal blue ink, the skin soft but lined at the joints from years of work. He jerked his hand back like he’d touched a hot stove, and looked up to meet a pair of hazel eyes lined with fine crinkles at the corners, the woman attached to them leaning against the truck in a faded linen button-down and cutoff jean shorts, silver hair pulled back in a loose braid that fell over one shoulder.
“Sorry about that,” she said, her voice carrying a faint gravel edge, like she’d smoked two packs a day for 20 years before quitting, and she didn’t pull her hand away right away, just held it there half an inch from his for a beat longer than necessary. “Been craving that slider since they set the truck up at noon. Guess great minds think alike.”
Ronan grunted, a sound he usually reserved for when the local teens snuck onto his property to party on the beach, but he didn’t step back. She was closer than most people got to him these days, close enough that he could smell lavender shampoo mixed with the faint tang of citrus from the seltzer she was holding, and when a group of kids ran past screaming, she stumbled a little, her shoulder pressing firm against his bicep for two full seconds before she steadied herself.
“Ronan,” he said, before he could think better of it, and he nodded at the ink on her knuckles. “You stamp books for a living?”
She laughed, a warm, throaty sound that cut through the noise of the band, and wiped the ink off on the side of her shorts. “Clara. Just moved here three months ago from Chicago, running the children’s section at the downtown library three days a week. Spent all morning stamping summer reading program cards. Ink still won’t come off.” She nodded at the lighthouse tattoo curling around his left forearm, faded from decades of sun exposure. “You used to run the light out at Cape Meares, right? I found a box of old 1920s lighthouse logs in the library’s basement last week. Full of handwritten entries about shipwrecks and rogue waves and the old keeper who kept a pet seal for 12 years. Been trying to track down someone who knows anything about that era.”
Ronan’s chest tightened. He’d spent months after his wife passed going through his own collection of lighthouse memorabilia, boxing it all up in the attic because he couldn’t stand to look at it, the thought of talking about it with anyone making his throat feel thick. Half of him wanted to mumble an excuse and leave right then, the familiar guilt curling in his gut, like he was betraying his wife by even talking to another woman who made his pulse pick up. The other half of him wanted to hear every detail about those logs, wanted to sit and talk to this woman for the rest of the night, wanted to stop feeling like he was just marking time until he was old enough to join his wife.
He sat down on the folding chair she gestured to next to her, close enough that their knees brushed when they shifted, and they talked for an hour and a half straight, yelling over the band when the music got too loud, leaning in so close their foreheads almost touched a handful of times. She told him about her husband, who’d died in a car crash two years prior, how she’d moved to the coast because he’d always talked about retiring here, how she’d been scared she’d made the wrong move until she found the logbooks. He told her about the time a rogue wave had crashed through the lighthouse’s lower window when he was 34, how his wife had brought him soup every night for a week when he caught pneumonia from the cold water, how he’d barely left his cottage in the three years since she’d died.
When the sun started to dip below the hills, painting the sky pink and orange, she said she had to head home, and he offered to walk her to her beat-up pickup truck parked at the edge of the lot. Halfway there, a tiny orange stray cat rubbed up against her ankle, and she stopped to kneel down and scratch it behind the ears, looking up at him when she stood, her face soft in the golden light.
“I know you think you’re supposed to hide out in that cottage forever,” she said, quiet enough that only he could hear it, and she reached out, tapping the lighthouse tattoo on his forearm with one ink-stained finger. “But the logbooks aren’t the only reason to come into town, you know.”
Ronan hesitated for a long time, his pulse thudding in his ears, the guilt warring with the warm, tight feeling in his chest he hadn’t felt since he was 22 and had first asked his wife out to a drive-in movie. He lifted his hand, slow, like he was scared she’d pull away, and brushed a stray strand of silver hair off her face, his fingers grazing the soft skin of her cheek. She didn’t pull away, just leaned into the touch a little, the corners of her mouth turning up in a small smile.
“I’ll be at the library at 10 tomorrow,” he said, and he meant it.
She grinned, pulling a crumpled receipt out of her pocket and scrawling her cell number on the back of it in that same royal blue ink, pressing it into his palm. Her fingers lingered on his for a second before she pulled away, climbing into her truck and waving at him through the window before she pulled out of the lot.
Ronan tucked the receipt into the pocket of his worn flannel shirt, the paper warm from her hand, and turned to walk back toward his own truck, not even bothering to check if his niece was still looking for him.
