Rafe Mendoza is 57, runs a vintage travel trailer restoration shop outside Flagstaff, and hasn’t willingly spoken to anyone connected to his ex-wife in 12 years. He’s got a scar across his left knuckle from a rusted bolt that snapped during a 2019 Airstream frame job, a hound dog named Muffin he rescued from a trailer park outside Kingman, and a very specific grudge against van life influencers who post reels of “rustic retreats” that they paid someone else to build while they posed in fringe jackets holding matcha lattes. He’s at the local beer garden’s monthly vintage vehicle meetup, perched on the step of his fully restored 1968 Shasta, sipping a hazy IPA and scrolling Instagram to mock the latest viral van life clip when a shadow falls over his phone.
He looks up. She’s 32, tanned, wearing frayed cutoff denim, steel toe work boots, and a faded 1977 Led Zeppelin US tour tee he swears he left at his ex’s house the week she moved out. Her dark hair is pulled back in a messy braid, there’s a smudge of grease on her left cheek, and she’s holding an IPA so cold it’s sweating through the paper coaster wrapped around its base. She leans one shoulder against the Shasta’s aluminum side, boot prodding the front tire, and holds eye contact when he glares, no smile, just a sharp, amused glint in her brown eyes. He recognizes her halfway through opening his mouth to tell her to get off his trailer. It’s Lila, his ex-wife’s niece, the last time he saw her she was 16, dyed pink hair, screaming at him for not letting her drive the Shasta to a music festival.
“Rafe,” she says, and her voice is lower than he remembers, rough around the edges, no trace of the teenaged squeak he associates with family holidays he’s spent a decade forgetting. “Took me three meetups to track you down. You don’t answer DMs.”
He snorts, wipes a streak of rust dust off his work overalls. “I block every account that has ‘van life’ in the bio. Figured you were one of the grifters asking me to do a free build for ‘exposure.’”
She laughs, and the sound bounces off the surrounding trailers, makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. She steps closer, holds out her phone, photos of a dented 1972 Airstream Sovereign pulled up on the screen. When he reaches to take the phone, their fingers brush, and he smells coconut sunscreen mixed with pine from the ponderosa pines lining the beer garden fence, the faint, sweet scent of peach lip balm. His chest tightens. He hasn’t felt this jittery around a woman since he was 20, fumbling through his first date with his ex at a drive-in movie theater.
He flips through the photos, nods slowly. The Airstream belonged to his ex’s mom, a woman he’d loved more than his own mother, who left it to Lila in her will last year. “Frame’s rusted out on the passenger side,” he says, tapping the screen. “Water damage in the back closet. You’re looking at 40 hours of work minimum, and parts are gonna run you three grand easy.”
“I can pay,” she says, and she sits down on the step next to him, their knees pressed together through the thin denim of their pants, no space between them. “And I’m not asking for a discount. I also know you only take three builds a year, so I’m prepared to beg.”
He teases her about the reels he’s seen of her driving a beat up minivan across the southwest, posting clips of herself making sourdough over a camp stove, and she teases him back, says he’s the reason she got into vintage trailers in the first place, that she still has the scrap of floral upholstery she kept when he let her help him reupholster the Shasta’s dinette when she was 12. He’s caught off guard, remembers that day, the way she’d covered herself in fabric glue, kept asking him questions about every bolt and seam, how his ex had rolled her eyes and said they were both wasting their time. The guilt he’d been feeling since he recognized her fades a little, replaced by a warm, tight pull low in his stomach. They sit there for two hours, talking over the roar of the crowd and the classic rock playing over the beer garden speakers, their knees brushing every time one of them shifts, she leans in when he talks about welding techniques, doesn’t check her phone once, which is the first thing that makes him think this isn’t just about the Airstream.
She admits it when the sun dips below the mountains, the string lights strung between the pines turning on, casting soft gold light across her face. She says she’s had a crush on him since she was 16, that she’d spent years following his work, that she knew he was single, that she didn’t care that he was once married to her aunt, that the aunt in question left him for a man who sells homemade essential oils out of a minivan and hasn’t spoken to her in four years anyway. He hesitates for half a second, the last of the old guilt flaring, then he leans in and kisses her, tastes the citrus of her IPA, the faint peach of her lip balm, the rough stubble on her upper lip brushes against his, and no one at the meetup even glances their way, too busy arguing over carburetors and beer prices to pay attention.
She leaves an hour later, scrawls her cell number on a napkin with a pen she pulls from her boot, says she’ll meet him at his shop at 9 the next morning with the Airstream in tow. She waves over her shoulder when she walks to her truck, and he sits there for a minute, finishing his beer, Muffin trotting up to nudge his hand with her cold wet nose. He picks up the napkin she left, tucks it into the front pocket of his work overalls, and calls the dog to follow him to his truck, already mentally mapping the first step of the Airstream’s frame repair.
