Delroy Hines, 62, retired air traffic controller, leans against a scaly pine trunk at the town’s annual fire department oyster roast, sweating through the collar of his faded fishing shirt. He’s been avoiding the cluster of Methodist ladies by the picnic table for 45 minutes, their obvious side glances and nudges making his jaw tight. Eight years after his wife Linda passed from ovarian cancer, the entire town still sees him as a fixer-upper project, not a guy who’s perfectly content with his quiet routine: rebuilding his 1972 Boston Whaler in his back lot, drinking cheap beer on his dock at sunset, never having to answer to anyone about where he’s going or when he’s coming home.
The wind shifts, and he catches a whiff of jasmine perfume over the briny smoke of the roast and the sharp tang of vinegar in the oyster shooters. A shoulder brushes his bicep, soft but firm, when the woman next to him reaches over his arm for a stack of paper napkins on the table behind him. He knows who she is immediately: Marnie Carter, 58, the new part-time librarian who moved to town six months prior, the exact woman the Methodist ladies have been trying to set him up with since the day she signed her lease. He’s ducked three separate attempts so far, made up excuses about boat repairs, doctor’s appointments, a fictional out-of-town cousin visiting.
“Sorry about that,” she says, holding up the napkins with a half-smirk, like she knows exactly who he is and exactly why he’s been hiding by the tree. “Those ladies have been running a full-scale operation to corner both of us for an hour now. Figured hiding out with you was the lesser of two evils.”
Delroy snorts, takes a sip of his beer. He’s never talked to her longer than 30 seconds at the grocery store checkout, but he’s noticed her before: the sun-streaked dark hair she usually pulls back in a messy braid, the calloused fingertips when she hands him his holds at the library, the way she walks her border collie on the beach at dawn every morning, barefoot even when the water’s cold. He watches her pop an oyster into her mouth, wipe a drop of hot sauce off her chin with the back of her hand, and he feels a low, warm tug in his chest that he hasn’t felt since Linda was alive. The feeling makes his stomach twist immediately, sharp with guilt. He’s spent eight years training himself to push that kind of feeling away, convinced even looking at another woman that way was a betrayal of the 32 years they’d built together.
They talk for 20 minutes, first about the oysters, Delroy explaining he learned to shuck them when he was a kid growing up on the Chesapeake, his dad making him shuck a bucket a day before he was allowed to go fishing with the rest of the family. When she asks him to show her how to do it without stabbing herself in the thumb, their hands brush when he passes her the shucking knife, his calloused palm grazing her knuckles, and the tingle runs all the way up his arm to his neck. She mentions she lost her husband, a commercial fisherman, seven years prior, lost at sea in a storm off the coast of Georgia, and Delroy finds himself leaning in, close enough to smell the salt in her hair and the faint peach fizz of her hard seltzer on her breath, no longer paying attention to the Methodist ladies or the kids chasing each other with sparklers or the band playing old country covers on the stage 50 feet away. For the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel like someone is talking at him, like they’re waiting for him to say he’s fine so they can move on to the next topic. She gets it, the quiet grief that never goes away, the way people look at you like you’re half a person long after you’ve glued most of the pieces back together.
The sun dips below the marsh, pink and orange bleeding across the sky, and someone switches on the string lights strung between the pines. A gust of wind blows a strand of her hair into his face, and he reaches up without thinking to brush it away, his fingers grazing the soft skin of her cheek. She doesn’t pull back, just looks up at him, her dark eyes glinting in the gold light, and licks her lower lip, slow. The guilt is still there, faint, but it’s drowned out by the hum of excitement under his skin, the quiet thrill of doing something he’s spent years telling himself he was never allowed to do again. He asks her if she wants to get out of there, head back to his dock, he has a bottle of crisp white wine stowed in the cooler on his half-finished Whaler, and she can tell him all about the busted outboard motor on her dinghy she’s been complaining about to the library regulars.
She nods, no hesitation, and they walk across the grass to his beat-up Ford F150, pine needles crunching under their boots. He opens the passenger door for her, his hand brushing the small of her back when she climbs up, and she leans into the touch, just a little. He drives slow down the beach road, windows rolled all the way down, salt wind blowing through the cab, and she hums along to the Merle Haggard song playing on the old radio. When he pulls into his driveway, the moon is bright enough to silver the waves crashing on the shore 100 yards away, and she turns to him in the seat, smiles, and rests her hand warm and firm on his denim-clad thigh.
