Leo Rainer, 61, makes his living building custom fly rods out of a sunlit workshop behind his cabin outside Boone, North Carolina. His hands are crisscrossed with thin scars from slipping exacto knives and snapped fishing line, his jeans are permanently stiff with tung oil, and he’s spent the last four years avoiding any social gathering that doesn’t involve waders or a riverbank. His late wife Linda used to drag him to every town fundraiser and potluck, but after she died of ovarian cancer in 2019, he’d settled into a quiet, predictable rhythm: wake at 5 a.m., drink black coffee on the porch, work in the shop until dusk, eat a frozen dinner, fall asleep to old westerns. The only reason he’s at the downtown beer garden’s annual trout conservation fundraiser is his old fishing buddy Earl won the silent auction for a rod Leo donated, and insisted Leo show up to take a bow for the crowd.
Now she’s standing so close their elbows brush every time either of them shifts, her cream linen blouse soaked through at the shoulder and the hem of her denim skirt dotted with rain spots, her chestnut hair falling loose from the low bun she’d had it pinned in. She laughs when she spots him, a low, warm sound that cuts through the noise of the rain drumming on the tin roof and the crowd yelling over each other. “I’ve been trying to track you down for two weeks,” she says, leaning in so her mouth is inches from his ear, her breath warm against his neck. He can smell lavender perfume mixed with the rain on her clothes and the vanilla lip balm she’s wearing, and he has to fight the urge to lean in closer.
She explains she found a crate of 1920s fly fishing journals in the library’s attic last month, donated by the family of a local doctor who used to fish the Watauga River back when you could catch 20-inch browns right off the main street bridge. She’d flipped through a few, saw half the pages were scribbled with hand-tied fly patterns and notes on where the best deep pools were before the dam was built, and immediately thought of him. He’s surprised, so surprised he doesn’t know what to say for a beat, and when a guy carrying a stack of pizza boxes squeezes past them, she stumbles forward, her chest pressing against his for half a second before she catches herself, one hand fisting in the front of his flannel shirt to steady herself. Her face flushes pink, and she doesn’t pull her hand away right away, her fingers brushing the scar on his chest he got from a chainsaw accident 12 years prior.
His first instinct is to pull back, to make an excuse about having a rod he needs to finish sanding before morning, to run back to his quiet cabin where he doesn’t have to feel the way his heart is hammering in his chest, the way his skin is tingling where her hand is resting. He’s spent four years telling himself he doesn’t get to have this, that moving on would be a betrayal of Linda, that anyone new would only get sick of his quiet habits and his scarred hands and his habit of talking to his hound dog like he’s a person. But then she tucks a strand of wet hair behind her ear, and her thumb brushes the back of his hand where it’s hanging at his side, and he feels the same jolt he gets when he’s standing in a river at dusk and a big trout hits his line, that sharp, unignorable pull that makes you forget everything else.
She asks him if he wants to walk back to her place a few blocks away, look at the journals, eat some of the beef chili she left simmering on her stove before she left the house. He hesitates for three full seconds, the voice in his head screaming that this is a mistake, that he’s too old, too set in his ways, too broken for something new. But then she grins, and he sees a smudge of blue ink on her left wrist, and remembers Marnie mentioning she fishes the South Fork every weekend, that she’s got a 10-pound brown mounted over her couch. He says yes.
They walk through the rain, he holds his flannel shirt over her head to keep her hair dry, their sides pressed together so tight they’re practically tripping over each other’s boots on the wet sidewalk. When they get to her front porch, she fumbles with her keys, her hands shaking a little from the cold, and he reaches out to steady her elbow, his palm resting on the soft knit of her sweater for a beat longer than necessary. She unlocks the door, and the warm smell of chili, cinnamon, and old paper drifts out, and he steps over the threshold behind her.