Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living sanding dents out of 1960s Airstream hulls and rewiring vintage camper electrical systems out of a converted barn 12 miles outside Flagstaff. He’s spent 12 years deliberately curating a life with zero unplanned interruptions, ever since his wife packed her bags and left for a job in Portland without leaving a note. His worst flaw? He’ll argue for an hour that eating cold canned chili over his workbench at 8 p.m. is preferable to a home-cooked meal with company, even when he knows he’s lying to himself. His buddy Jim had to literally drag him to the VFW post’s weekly fish fry that Friday, saying the old cook who burned every piece of catfish for a decade finally quit.
The first thing Manny notices when he walks in is the smell: crisp fried breading, tangy coleslaw, no acrid burnt oil stinging his nostrils. The second is the woman behind the counter, wiping down a stack of paper plates with a rag, dark hair pulled back in a messy braid streaked with a single silver strand right at the temple. He’s never seen her before. He hangs back by the soda machine, half ready to bolt, when Jim shoves him forward toward the serving line.
He reaches for a plastic fork at the same time she does. Their knuckles brush, and Manny feels the rough, raised callus on her index finger, the kind you get from years of working with your hands. “Sorry,” he mumbles, pulling his hand back like he touched a hot exhaust pipe. She smirks, holding the fork out to him, her grip brushing his palm when he takes it. “You must be Manny. Jim’s told me all about the hermit who fixes trailers up in the hills.” Her voice is low, rough around the edges, like she spends half her day yelling over power tools too.
He can’t think of a single thing to say, so he just nods, staring at the paper plate she slides across the counter to him, piled high with catfish, hush puppies, and a scoop of coleslaw dotted with paprika. When she leans across to hand him a plastic cup of tartar sauce, her faded gray cotton t-shirt pulls tight across her shoulders, and Manny catches a whiff of lemon dish soap, fried catfish, and the faint, sharp scent of pine saddle conditioner. He’s so flustered he fumbles the cup, and tartar sauce splatters on the toe of his work boot. She laughs, a loud, unselfconscious sound, and dabs a napkin at the edge of his plate where sauce dripped. Her wrist brushes his forearm for half a second, and Manny’s skin prickles.
He sits down at a table with Jim, but he can’t eat more than two bites of fish before he’s glancing back over at the counter. She catches him staring three separate times, and winks every single time, a slow, lopsided little gesture that makes his chest feel tight. Jim teases him, says her name’s Lena, she’s the former post commander’s niece, moved back to town six months prior after her husband of 20 years, a county sheriff, retired to Florida and left her for a 28-year-old realtor. She restores vintage saddles out of her garage, and she’s been asking about the trailer restorer up the hill for weeks, because she inherited a beat-up 1962 Scotty trailer from her dad that she wants to fix up to take camping.
Manny snorts, says he doesn’t have time to take on side work, that his schedule’s already booked solid through next spring. It’s a lie, and he knows Jim knows it’s a lie. He’s got one client left for the year, and that job’s 90% done. He just doesn’t want to let someone into his space, into the routine he’s spent so long building. He tells himself he’s not attracted to her, that he’s just bored, that he should finish his fish, go home, and forget the whole thing.
But 10 minutes later, he’s walking back up to the counter to get a second piece of catfish, even though he’s already full. She leans against the counter, crossing her arms, and smirks at him again. “Came back for more, huh? I knew the hermit couldn’t resist decent cooking.” He mumbles something about the fish being better than he expected, and she laughs again. She says she’s looking for someone to help her fix up the Scotty, that she can do most of the interior work but she doesn’t know the first thing about patching aluminum hulls or rewiring electrical systems. She offers to trade him three custom tooled leather seat covers for his truck, plus a home-cooked meal every Saturday they work on the trailer, if he’ll help her.
His first instinct is to say no. To make up an excuse about being too busy, to walk out, drive back up to his barn, and go back to his quiet, empty routine. But then she leans in closer, close enough that he can feel her warm breath on his ear when she speaks, quiet enough no one else can hear. “I know you think being alone is easier. I thought the same thing for six months, after he left. But easier doesn’t mean better, Manny.”
He freezes. No one’s called him out on that stupid, self-imposed isolation in years. He looks at her, at the flecks of gold in her dark brown eyes, the smudge of flour on her left cheek, the callus on her finger peeking out from the edge of her rag, and he realizes he’s been wasting 12 years of his life hiding from something that might not even hurt that bad this time. He nods, before he can talk himself out of it. “Yeah. I’ll help you.”
She grins, and scribbles her phone number on a napkin, shoving it into the pocket of his work flannel. Her fingers brush his chest through the fabric, and he doesn’t flinch this time. He walks out to his beat-up 2001 Ford F-150 10 minutes later, the napkin crumpled in his palm, still warm from being in his pocket. He turns the key, the truck rumbles to life, and instead of turning left onto the highway that leads up to his barn, he turns right, toward the hardware store, to pick up the pack of rubber window seals he knows a 1962 Scotty will need to stop leaking.
