Ronny Voss, 62, has spent 15 years restoring vintage travel trailers out of a repurposed hay barn outside Boise, and his greatest flaw is that he’d rather rebuild a rotted Airstream frame alone in 100-degree heat than ask for a single favor. His ex-wife left him 8 years ago for a real estate broker in Scottsdale, and he’s deliberately kept anyone who isn’t a fellow gearhead or his now 28-year-old son Jax at arm’s length ever since. He’s at the Ada County Fair on a sweltering August afternoon specifically to hunt down a rare 1972 Airstream window seal he’s been chasing for three months, boots kicking up dust, denim work shirt stuck to his back with sweat, the faint smell of welding fumes still clinging to his sleeves even after he showered that morning.
He rounds the corner of the craft booth row faster than he should, shoulder slamming into a woman standing by a table stacked with hand-thrown pottery, and half her iced lavender lemonade sloshes onto the front of her linen button down. He starts to mumble an apology, and then he recognizes her. Mara Hale, 52, Jax’s old high school art teacher, the woman he’d spent every parent-teacher conference 12 years prior sneaking glances at, too ashamed to admit he was attracted to her when he was still married, and when she was the person responsible for keeping his kid from skipping class to spray paint under the overpass. She retired last year, he remembers Jax mentioning, after her husband died of a sudden heart attack 18 months prior.
She laughs, the same crinkly, loud laugh he remembered, dabs at the lemonade stain with a paper napkin, and calls him by name before he can turn and walk away. She says Jax followed her on Instagram last year, sends her photos of the street art he paints in Portland, still has the terrible lopsided mug Jax made in her 10th grade class on her kitchen shelf. He’s stuck, so he leans against the edge of her booth, the rough pine edge digging into his forearm, the smell of fried funnel cake and cut grass drifting over from the food stands, the Ferris wheel bell dinging every 30 seconds in the background. He watches her tuck a strand of hair streaked with silver behind her ear, notices a smudge of blue clay on her left wrist, calluses on her fingertips from throwing 40 pounds of clay a day.
He’s fighting the pull in his chest the entire time, telling himself this is off limits, that the entire town would side-eye them if they saw him flirting with his son’s old teacher, that he’s too rusty at this to not make a fool of himself. When she reaches across the booth to grab the small ceramic mug she made for Jax, her knuckles brush his, and he jolts like he touched a live wire, heat crawling up his neck. She teases him, says he still wears the same scuffed work boots he wore to those conferences, the ones with the Airstream keychain hanging off the left laces. He’s shocked she noticed that, back when he’d thought he was being so careful to not draw attention to how much he was watching her.
She mentions she’s been looking for a small vintage camper to fix up, drive out to the Owyhee Desert on weekends to paint, got quoted $2000 just to inspect a beat-up 1968 Scotty she found on Facebook Marketplace. He snorts before he can stop himself, says that quote’s a scam, he can look it over for a case of hazy IPA, no charge. He panics right after he says it, ready to backtrack, but she lights up, leans forward across the booth so their faces are only a foot apart, and he can smell the lavender lotion she’s wearing, see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes.
They exchange numbers, and she walks around the side of the booth to hug him goodbye. He tenses up for half a second, hasn’t hugged anyone that isn’t Jax in years, and then relaxes, his hand hovering over her back for a beat before he rests it gently on the space between her shoulder blades, feels the soft fabric of her shirt under his palm. When she pulls back, their faces are inches apart, and for a second he thinks he’s going to kiss her, right there in the middle of the fair where half the county knows both of them, but he just brushes a stray piece of dust off her shoulder, says he’ll text her Saturday morning to confirm.
He walks back to his beat-up Ford F150, the rare window seal forgotten in the pocket of his work pants, and stops at the funnel cake stand on the way, buys one dusted with powdered sugar even though he hasn’t eaten anything that sweet since Jax was a teenager. He climbs into the truck, pulls out his phone, and texts her first, says Ronny here. That Scotty better not have more rust than metal. And the IPA has to be hazy, no crap light beer. He gets a reply 20 seconds later, a photo of her holding up a four pack of his favorite local hazy IPA next to a dented silver Scotty parked in her driveway, the caption says Don’t be late. He grins, shoves his phone in his pocket, turns the key in the ignition, the sound of the fair’s carnival music fading behind him as he pulls out of the parking lot.
