Silas Mercer, 62, vintage camper restorer, has spent the last three days buffing the aluminum skin of his 1972 Airstream Sovereign until it glows like a polished nickel coin, parked in the grassy vintage camper row at the Sevier County Fair. The air hangs thick and sweet with fried dough and cotton candy, the distant shriek of kids on the Zipper cutting through the hum of conversation. He’s leaning against the trailer’s hitch, sipping warm root beer from a dented can, when he sees her walk up. He’d recognize that loose, rolling gait anywhere, even after 12 years apart.
Mara Hale, 54, his ex-wife’s younger half-sister, holds a contest judge’s clipboard, her dark hair streaked with silver pulled back in a messy braid, the hem of her linen dress dusted with grass stain. The last time they’d spoken, she’d been 22, red-faced and screaming at him on his front porch, calling him a selfish coward for walking away from her sister. He’d almost thrown his work boot at her then, too raw from finding his ex in bed with a roofing contractor to care about a kid’s tantrum. His first instinct is to duck inside the Airstream, lock the door, and wait for her to move to the next entry. His boots are rooted to the grass instead.
She stops a foot away, tilting her head, and the corner of her mouth tugs up in that half-teasing grin he’d forgotten she had. “Silas Mercer. I’d know that stupid lightning bolt tattoo on your forearm anywhere. You still restoring old campers, or did you finally give up and get a real job?” Her voice is lower than he remembers, rougher around the edges, and she smells like coconut sunscreen and jasmine, the same perfume she wore to his wedding in 2001. He blinks, taken aback, and mumbles something about the shop still running, still turning ratty old trailers into something people will pay six figures for. She leans in past him, her bare shoulder brushing the length of his bicep when she cranes to look at the custom walnut counter he installed inside, and he can feel the heat of her skin through his faded work shirt. She doesn’t move away for three full seconds, long enough for him to count the faint freckles across the bridge of her nose.
He should step back. This is wrong, for a dozen obvious reasons. She’s still technically family, even if his divorce was finalized 8 years ago. He spent the better part of a decade resenting every last person with the Hale last name, convinced they’d all taken his ex’s side, written him off as the bad guy. But when she turns back to him, holding up the tiny carved blue jay he’d made for the cabinet pull, her eyes wide with surprise, that resentment melts a little. “You remembered. I used to collect blue jay feathers when I was a kid, remember? I’d leave them on your porch when we visited.” He does remember. He’d thought they were from the ex, back then, had thrown half of them away before he’d caught Mara slipping one under the doormat once.
They talk for an hour, leaning against the Airstream’s side, as the fair crowds thin out, the sun dipping low below the Smoky Mountains, painting the sky pink and tangerine. She tells him she moved back to Tennessee three months prior, left her travel writing job in Portland, left her husband of 15 years after she found out he’d been embezzling from the small outdoor education nonprofit they ran together. She tells him she’d known her sister was cheating six months before Silas found out, had tried to tell her to stop, had gotten screamed at for sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. “I’ve felt guilty about that porch fight for 12 years,” she says, picking at a loose thread on her dress, not meeting his eye for the first time all night. “You didn’t deserve any of it.”
He buys her a fried peach pie from the last remaining food cart, and they sit on the step of the Airstream, sharing it off a crumpled paper napkin. The carnival lights flicker off one by one, the only sound left the distant chirp of crickets and the low murmur of other campers down the row. She reaches over to brush a crumb of pie crust off his stubble, her palm warm against his jaw, and she doesn’t pull her hand away when he covers it with his own. He can taste the sugar and cinnamon on her breath when she leans in, half hesitant, like she’s waiting for him to pull away. He doesn’t. The kiss is slow, soft, nothing like the frantic, angry hookups he’d had in the first few years after the divorce, and when they pull apart, she laughs, quiet, her forehead resting against his. “This is so stupid,” she says, and he agrees, but he’s smiling too, a real smile, the kind he hasn’t let show in years.
He drives her back to the little log cabin she’s renting outside Gatlinburg, his old 1998 Ford F-150 rumbling down the dark two-lane road, her bare feet propped up on the dash. She asks him if he’s free the next day, if he’ll take her up to the hiking trail he used to rave about, the one with the waterfall that glows pale blue at sunrise from the limestone deposits in the rock. He nods, already making a mental list of the gear he’ll need to pack, the work orders he can push to the end of the week. She kisses him again quick before she gets out of the truck, tucking a crumpled piece of paper with her phone number into the breast pocket of his work shirt. He waits until she’s inside the cabin, until the warm yellow porch light flickers on, before he pulls out of the gravel driveway. He taps the steering wheel twice to the beat of the old Patsy Cline song playing on the radio, already mentally rearranging his shop schedule for the next week.
