Rafe Marquez, 62, retired fire apparatus mechanic, nursed a brown ale at a splintered pine picnic table, grease still crusted under the edges of his fingernails from three hours spent prying a rusted exhaust manifold off his 1972 Ford F-100 that afternoon. He’d only started coming to the weekly neighborhood beer garden two months prior, dragged by his former fire station captain, and it was the only thing on his calendar that didn’t involve wrenches, frozen dinners, or the half-finished photo album of his late wife Elara’s family trips he’d been avoiding for a year. The air smelled like smoked brats, pine from the adjacent park, and the faint sharp tang of impending rain. Fairy lights strung between oak trees cast warm gold over the crowd, and a bluegrass band plucked a slow, twangy tune at the far end of the lot.
He tensed when he recognized the woman sliding onto the opposite end of his table, the only open spot left in the packed space. Mia Carter, 38, the city council rep who’d been all over the local news for the past two weeks, vowing to shut the beer garden down over noise complaints from the new upscale condo building three blocks over. Rafe had ranted about her for ten minutes straight to his neighbor two days prior, called her a carpetbagger who didn’t care about the neighborhood’s old guard, the folks who’d lived here through the crack epidemics and the gentrification waves that pushed half his old friends out to the suburbs. She wore a tailored navy blazer over a faded Flogging Molly t-shirt, scuffed white sneakers peeking out under the hem of her slacks, a stack of zoning papers tucked under one arm. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, a few strands stuck to the sweat on her neck, and she looked so tired Rafe almost didn’t say the snarky line he’d been rehearsing in his head for weeks.
She fumbled with her stack of papers when the first fat raindrop hit the table, and her hand brushed his as they both reached for the stack of printouts sliding across the wet wood. He felt the rough callus on the side of her index finger, from gripping a pen for hours on end, and the faint smell of lavender hand cream mixed with rain hit his nose. She apologized, voice rough like she’d been yelling through meetings all day, ordered a hard cider from the server passing by, and dropped her head into her hands for three full seconds before she looked up at him, eyebrows raised. “You’re probably about to yell at me, aren’t you,” she said, half smiling. “Everyone else does these days.”
Rafe hesitated, then grunted, took a sip of his ale. He’d been ready to tear into her, to tell her the beer garden was the only thing this neighborhood had left that didn’t cost $20 a plate, that the noise complaints came from people who’d moved here six months ago and didn’t care that the lot used to be a derelict dump full of broken glass before the neighborhood association turned it into the pop-up space. Instead, he said, “You look like you’ve had a worse day than I have.” She laughed, a loud, throaty sound that cut through the chatter of the crowd, and told him she’d been in back-to-back meetings for 12 hours, that the news had twisted her words, that she wasn’t trying to shut the garden down, she was trying to negotiate a later noise curfew so the condos couldn’t shut it down entirely, that she’d grown up two blocks over, her dad had been a construction worker who’d helped pave the paths in the adjacent park.
The rain picked up, the bluegrass band cut off mid-song, people scrambling to grab their coolers and fold up their chairs as the wind picked up, blowing the fairy lights back and forth so their shadows danced across the wet grass. Rafe had a large fold-up umbrella tucked in the bed of his truck, parked half a block down, and he offered to walk her to her car, parked two blocks over on the side street where parking didn’t require a permit. They huddled under the umbrella, his arm brushing her shoulder every time the wind gusted, and she leaned into him a little to stay out of the rain, her shoulder warm through the thin fabric of her blazer. He told her about the F-100 he was restoring, about his 32 years fixing fire trucks for the Denver FD, about Elara, how she’d loved coming to the old block parties that used to be held in the same lot before the developers bought up most of the street.
When they got to her beat-up Subaru, she turned to him, rain dotted on her cheeks, her eyes glinting from the streetlight behind him. She reached up and tugged a dry oak leaf out of the edge of his graying crew cut, her fingers brushing his temple for half a second, and told him she’d been trying to teach herself basic car maintenance for months, kept messing up the oil changes on her Subaru. She asked if she could stop by his garage sometime, bring beer, watch him work on the F-100, maybe pick up a few tips. Rafe felt his face warm up, a flutter in his chest he hadn’t felt since the first time he’d kissed Elara, back when they were 22 and he’d just gotten hired at the FD. He pulled a crumpled napkin out of his jeans pocket, scribbled his cell number on it, the grease under his nail smudging the edge of the paper, and handed it to her.
She waved through the window as she pulled out of the parking spot, and Rafe stood there for a minute, umbrella held over his head even though the rain had slowed to a light drizzle, watching her taillights disappear around the corner. He reached into his pocket to grab his keys, and his fingers brushed the crumpled zoning printout he’d grabbed off the picnic table earlier, the one she’d been doodling on while he talked about his old fire truck repair jobs, the margins covered in silly little sketches of fire trucks with googly eyes.
