Javi Ruiz, 52, makes his living restoring vintage camper vans out of a cinder block garage behind his Asheville, North Carolina, home. He’s got a scar snaking up his left forearm from a 2020 accident with a jigsaw, a habit of chewing peppermint gum when he’s focused, and a hard rule he’s stuck to for seven years: no socializing with anyone who knew him when he was married. His ex-wife left without warning for a crystal-selling wellness guru in Portland, and he’s spent the years since keeping his circle small: his 23-year-old daughter who texts him cat memes from grad school in Raleigh, his 19-year-old part-time employee Milo, and the guy who sells him scrap lumber at the hardware store.
He only ends up at the neighborhood dive’s weekly trivia night because Milo won a $50 bar tab in a raffle and bailed 20 minutes before, texting a blurry photo of himself in the ER with a sprained ankle from a skateboarding accident and a demand that Javi not let the free beer go to waste. Javi grabs the corner table farthest from the stage, orders a Pabst, and hunches over his phone half-listening to the trivia host run through the rules until he hears her laugh. He looks up fast. It’s Lila Marquez, his ex-wife’s first cousin, the woman he hasn’t spoken to since he signed his divorce papers. She’s 48, now the principal at the elementary school his daughter attended, and she’s got a silver hoop in her left nostril he doesn’t remember from the last time he saw her, a faded Nirvana flannel tied around her waist over high-waisted jeans, her dark hair braided down her back.
The bar smells like fried pickles and stale cigarette smoke that’s been trapped in the wood paneling for 30 years, the jukebox playing Tom Petty low enough that it doesn’t drown out the shouts of teams arguing over answers. Lila works her way through the room collecting answer slips, and when she gets to his table, she leans in so close he can smell cedar shampoo and vanilla lip balm on her, her elbow brushing his bicep when she reaches for the half-scrawled slip of paper he’d filled out. “Javi Ruiz,” she says, grinning so the dimples in her cheeks show, the same dimples he remembers from 15 years prior when he helped her change a flat tire outside the high school after a parent-teacher conference. “I thought you’d holed up in that garage forever.”
He doesn’t know what to say at first, his throat tight, the cold condensation from his beer dripping down his wrist onto the frayed cuff of his work jeans. He’s spent seven years telling himself anyone connected to his ex is off-limits, that the small town gossip that would come with even talking to Lila would be more trouble than it’s worth, that he doesn’t have the energy for any kind of relationship, casual or otherwise. But she doesn’t leave, pulling out the empty chair across from him and sitting down, her knee brushing his under the table when she shifts to get comfortable. She tells him she quit her job as a 4th grade teacher two years prior to take the principal role, that she’s been single for three years after breaking up with a guy who collected vintage typewriters and refused to let her hang art in their apartment, that she always thought his ex was an idiot for leaving him.
He finds himself laughing before he can stop himself, telling her about the 1972 VW Westfalia he’s restoring for a client in Charlotte, about the time Milo tried to paint a van neon pink without testing the color first, about his daughter’s research on 19th century textile workers that she won’t stop rambling about on FaceTime. When trivia ends, he realizes three hours have passed without him noticing, and when he walks outside, it’s pouring rain, his beat-up Ford F150 parked three blocks away, the skies so dark he can barely see the streetlights through the sheets of water.
Lila offers him a ride, holding up her keys to a beat-up Subaru Outback with a “Protect Local Pollinators” sticker on the back window. He hesitates for half a second, the voice in the back of his head screaming about gossip and unspoken family rules and all the ways this could blow up in his face, before he nods. The heat in her car is cranked up, rain lashing so hard against the windows the world outside is blurry, and when she pulls over at the stop sign at the end of the bar’s parking lot, she turns to face him, her knee pressing against his, her hand resting on the center console six inches from his. “I’ve been wanting to ask you out for 15 years,” she says, quiet, like she’s admitting something she’s embarrassed about, and he can see the faint freckles across her nose even in the dim glow of the dashboard lights.
He doesn’t say anything, just leans across the console and kisses her, tastes peppermint lip balm and the sour of the hard cider she’d been drinking all night, her hand coming up to tangle in the graying hair at the nape of his neck, warm against his skin. When they pull apart, he asks her if she wants to come back to his shop, says he’s got hot cocoa mix and a working propane stove in the Westfalia he’s restoring, that he can show her the custom reclaimed oak he’s been fitting for the cabinets. She grins, those dimples showing again, and puts the car in drive, turning toward his street. The rain lets up just enough to let a sliver of moon peek through the clouds, lighting up the crumpled 90s rock trivia answer sheet he’d stuffed in his jeans pocket earlier.
