Manny Ortega, 62, made his living restoring vintage Airstreams out of the cinder block garage attached to his south Tucson bungalow. He’d moved to the desert three years prior from central Texas, after his wife of 32 years passed from ovarian cancer, and he’d spent most of that time avoiding neighborly small talk like it was a rusted out trailer frame with hidden water damage. His biggest personality flaw, if you asked the woman who ran the local hardware store, was that he’d rather spend 12 hours sanding aluminum than admit he was lonely. He’d only showed up to the July block party because the 10-year-old next door had banged on his door at 6 p.m. holding a handwritten sign for her lemonade stand, big pigtails swinging, and he didn’t have the heart to say no.
He was leaning against a stop sign at the edge of the crowd, boots still dusty from a full day of work, holding a plastic cup of lukewarm pink lemonade, when he spotted her. The sun was dipping low enough to paint the stucco houses burnt orange, the air smelled like charred hamburgers and citronella candles, and kids were screaming so loud on the slip and slide set up in the middle of the street that he almost didn’t hear her when she walked up to the cooler two feet from him, elbow brushing his grease-stained work shirt cuff as she reached for a Modelo. She apologized, soft, and when he looked down he caught her eye first: hazel, crinkled at the corners like she laughed a lot, silver hoop earrings catching the last of the sun, a thin white scar snaking up her left forearm from wrist to elbow. She said she recognized him as the guy who fixed the shiny silver trailers down the block, that she’d slowed down to gawk at them twice when she was driving through the neighborhood earlier that week.
He didn’t recognize her at first, until she mentioned she was finalizing her divorce from the guy three houses down, the same guy who’d called the city twice to complain about Manny running his generator past 7 p.m. when he was up against a deadline. A sharp twist of something like guilt hit him right in the chest then, and he almost made an excuse to leave right there. He knew better than to get tangled up in anyone’s ex-wife drama, especially not with the most insufferable guy on the block. But she didn’t let him step away. She leaned against the stop sign next to him, one shoulder propped against the metal, and told him she’d grown up helping her dad fix old Chevy pickups on their farm in southern Ohio, that she knew exactly what it meant to have grease under your nails for three days straight no matter how hard you scrubbed. She teased him about the faded Willie Nelson patch sewn to his shirt pocket, said she’d seen him in concert three times in the 90s, that she still had the t-shirt somewhere in a storage unit.
He found himself leaning in when she talked, like he had to strain to hear her over the noise of the party even though she was only six inches away. When a group of kids darted past chasing a stray dog, she stumbled a little, her knee knocking hard against his, and she didn’t step back to make space after. He could smell jasmine lotion and the faint hoppy scent of her beer, and his throat went dry when she held up her forearm to show him the scar, explaining she’d gotten it when she crashed her motorcycle on a trip to Sedona when she was 28, that her ex had yelled at her for three hours afterward instead of asking if she was okay.
The conflict hit fast. Her ex rounded the corner of the picnic table, red-faced from too many beers, and stopped short when he saw her standing next to Manny. He made a snide comment about her wasting time talking to the neighborhood hermit who kept everyone up with his loud tools, and Manny tensed up, ready to tell the guy to go to hell before Lena did it first. She laughed, sharp and bright, and looped her arm through Manny’s, pressing her whole side against his, her warm weight seeping through the thin cotton of his shirt. She told her ex to go bother someone who cared, that she was busy talking to the only person at this party who didn’t treat her like she was a piece of property to argue over. The guy sputtered for a second, then turned and stormed off, and she didn’t let go of Manny’s arm until he was out of sight.
She apologized again, this time for dragging him into her mess, and he shook his head, said it was the most fun he’d had at a block party in his whole life. He didn’t even think before he asked if she wanted to come see the 1958 Airstream he was finishing up for a client up in Flagstaff, said he had cold root beer in the mini fridge out in his garage, no loud music, no nosy neighbors. She grinned, and slipped her hand into his, her palm soft against his calloused, grease-stained one, and didn’t let go when they walked down the sidewalk past the rest of the party guests, no one even paying them any attention.
The screen door creaked shut behind them, cutting out the distant noise of the party, and she squeezed his hand once before letting go to run her fingers along the polished aluminum curve of the trailer waiting in the garage.
