Nolan Rourke, 61, makes his living building custom fly rods out of a cinder block workshop tucked three miles up a dirt road outside Franklin, North Carolina. He’s lived alone since his wife left him for an Asheville real estate agent 12 years prior, and his biggest personality flaw is that he’s convinced himself he likes it that way. He only agreed to show up to the annual fire department barbecue because his best friend, a retired game warden named Jimmie, threatened to leave a half-dead skunk on his workshop porch if he bailed again.
He’s leaned against a warped picnic table half-listening to a guy ramble about trout stocking when he feels a hand wrap tight around his left forearm, calluses catching on the fine white hair there. He twists around fast, half-ready to snap, and finds a woman grinning up at him, one boot caught under the leg of a rolling cooler. She’s 58 if he had to guess, wearing a flowy yellow sundress that’s smudged with dirt at the hem and scuffed steel-toe work boots, her dark hair streaked with gray pulled back in a messy braid. She smells like cedar mulch and lavender hand cream, not the cloying floral perfume his ex used to douse herself in.
“Sorry about that,” she says, straightening up, but she doesn’t pull her hand away right away. “These boots have zero traction on wet grass, and I swear that cooler moved right in front of me.”
He grunts, says no problem, fully expecting her to wander off toward the beer tent like everyone else. She doesn’t. She yanks out the plastic bench seat next to him, sits down so their knees are six inches apart, no more, and holds out a calloused hand. Marnie, she says, new county ag extension agent, moved here three weeks prior from Portland, got sick of the rain and the people who argued for 45 minutes at coffee shops about whether oat milk was ethically harvested.
He snorts before he can stop himself. That’s one thing you won’t get around here, he says. Most folks think oat milk is something you feed to goats.
She laughs, loud and rough around the edges, and takes a sip of the cheap lager she’s holding. The air around them smells like charcoal smoke and slow-cooked pork ribs, the tinny rattle of Johnny Cash coming from a portable speaker by the fire truck mixing with the sound of kids screaming on a bounce house set up in the far field. He’d been planning to leave 20 minutes earlier, had his keys in his pocket, but he doesn’t reach for them.
They talk for 40 minutes straight. She tells him about getting chewed out by an 82-year-old cattle farmer at the feed store earlier that week for asking if they sold organic chicken feed. He tells her about the time he spent three days camped out by a stream in the Great Smoky Mountains testing a new rod design, only to have a bear steal his cooler full of beer. He doesn’t notice Jimmie waving at him from the beer tent, doesn’t notice the sun dipping low enough to paint the sky streaks of tangerine and rose, doesn’t even think to check his phone for the time.
He’s halfway through a story about a client who tried to pay him with a live chicken when she leans in, pointing at a fireman across the field wearing a neon pink lei and a beat-up cowboy hat, her shoulder pressing firm against his, her breath warm against the side of his neck. “See that guy?” she says, quiet enough only he can hear. “He tried to ask me out yesterday, said he could show me all the best hidden swimming holes in the county. I told him I’d rather wrestle a bear.”
He laughs loud enough that a couple people at the next table glance over, and for half a second he feels that familiar, sharp twist of disgust in his gut—disgust that he’s letting himself enjoy this, that he’s even entertaining the idea of letting someone new into his small, carefully curated life, that he’s stupid enough to think anyone would stick around this time. But the feeling fades fast, replaced by a quiet, thrumming thrill he hasn’t felt in more than a decade, the kind that makes his palms sweat a little and his chest feel light, like he’s breathing deeper than he has in years.
She mentions she has an old bamboo fly rod her dad left her when he died, the tip cracked during the cross-country move, and everyone she’d asked said he was the only guy within 50 miles who could fix it right. He almost says he’s backed up three months, that he’s not taking new repair work, that she’d be better off ordering a new rod off Amazon. He doesn’t. Tells her he can fix it, no charge, if she brings it by his workshop tomorrow at 10 a.m.
She blinks, like she didn’t expect him to say yes, then grins and pulls out a beat-up iPhone with a cracked screen, handing it to him to put his number in. His fingers brush hers when he takes the phone, the calluses on his hands from 20 years of sanding rod blanks catching on her knuckles, and neither of them pulls away for a beat longer than necessary. He types in his number, saves it as Nolan (fly rod guy, not a bear wrestler), and hands it back. She laughs when she sees the contact name, says she’ll be there, and she brings her own coffee—black, no sugar—if he’s got an extra mug to spare.
She says her roommate is blowing up her phone asking her to come help unload a new shipment of garden seeds, slings a frayed canvas tote over her shoulder, and waves as she heads toward her beat-up forest green Subaru parked at the edge of the field. He doesn’t say anything stupid, doesn’t beg her to stay, doesn’t make a fool of himself. He just nods, twists the cap off the cold beer he’d grabbed from the cooler ten minutes earlier, takes a slow sip, and watches her taillights disappear down the rutted dirt road, no part of him dreading the sound of his workshop door opening at 10 the next morning.
