Moe Vang, 52, has run his own forensic water damage assessment business out of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, for 11 years. He’s got a rigid, self-imposed rule he’s never broken: no fraternizing with clients, no matter how friendly they are, no matter how much he likes the cut of their smile. Eight years prior, his ex-wife left him for a guy who ran a mobile craft beer truck, and he’d built the rule as a wall, something to hide behind so he didn’t have to risk getting that stupid, gut-punch kind of hurt again. Most Fridays, he eats alone at the VFW fish fry, sits at the far end of the counter, drinks a cheap local pilsner, eats his cod extra crispy with vinegar coleslaw, then goes home to sort through his minor league baseball card collection. That’s the routine, and it works, even if it’s a little quiet.
He’s mid-bite of cod when he hears the laugh, warm and rough around the edges, over the Johnny Cash playing low on the jukebox. He looks up, and there’s Clara Hale, the woman whose lake house he’d assessed two weeks prior, a pipe under her kitchen sink had leaked for three months before she noticed, rotted out half the subfloor, ruined three of her late husband’s old hunting boots. He’d spent four hours at her place that day, had laughed at her story about her husband trying to teach her to ice fish and falling through the thin ice twice, had turned down her offer of a beer when he finished, mumbled some garbage about company policy, even though he’s the only person who works for his company, the only one who makes the rules. He’d run out fast enough that he left his favorite tape measure on her kitchen counter, had kicked himself for it all the way home.
The retired long-haul trucker sitting between them gets up to grab a second slice of peach pie, and Clara shifts two stools closer, her forest green wool coat sleeve brushing the frayed cuff of his Carhartt flannel. He catches a whiff of her lotion, pine and vanilla, not heavy, the kind of scent that sticks soft to your shirt collar long after someone leaves. She looks over, meets his eyes, no shifty look away, no polite half-smile, just a full, teasing grin, and says “Told you I’d catch you out here eventually. You left pretty quick the other day.” Moe feels his neck heat up, the way it did when he was a kid getting caught stealing candy from the corner store, and he laughs, scratches the back of his buzzed head, admits he’d been avoiding running into her because of that stupid rule he’s clung to for years.
She pulls his tape measure out of her purse, slides it across the Formica counter to him, their fingers brush when he grabs it, her skin is softer than he expects, warm even through the cold of the metal tape. The whole town had been gossiping a month prior about a local bakery owner dating the HVAC guy who’d fixed her walk-in cooler, half the guys at the VFW had called it trashy, unprofessional, Moe had even agreed with them, had said mixing work and personal never ends well. Now he’s sitting here, half his cod gone, his beer sweating on the counter, fighting the urge to lean in closer, to ask her if she wants to get out of there. She mentions the stack of 1980s minor league baseball cards she’d found in her husband’s old footlocker earlier that week, the ones he’d commented on when he was moving her kitchen cabinets to check the water damage, says she’d pulled them all out, didn’t know what to do with them, knew he collected them.
The fight in his head lasts all of 10 seconds. One side screams about the rule, about the gossip, about the risk of getting hurt again, the other side is fixated on the crinkles around her eyes when she laughs, the way she’d remembered his card collection offhand, the way her knee is brushing his under the counter now, and she’s not pulling away. She says she’s got a six pack of that same pilsner he’s drinking in her fridge, if he wants to come look through the cards tonight, no pressure, no strings, just beer and old baseball cards. He doesn’t hesitate this time, says yes, slaps a 20 down on the counter to cover both their tabs, grabs his work bag off the hook under the counter.
They walk out into the crisp October air, the sky dark purple, the smell of wood smoke and fallen oak leaves hanging thick over the street. The VFW’s neon red sign glows behind them, casting pink light over the sidewalk. When they step off the curb to cross to her beat-up 2008 Ford F150, her hand brushes his, and he laces their fingers together, no awkward fumbling, no overthinking. She squeezes his hand once, soft, and leads him toward the truck.
