Elias Voss, 57, vintage camper restoration specialist, only showed up to the Madison County summer beer festival to collect a $1,400 check from a client who’d been dodging him for three weeks. He’d rather be back at his barn, stripping the varnish off a 1968 Winnebago’s dinette, listening to old Merle Haggard records so loud the walls vibrate. He hates crowds. Hates small talk. Hates the way the summer humidity sticks his well-worn work flannel to his back, even with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. The cold IPA in his hand is a peace offering from the food truck owner he helped fix a broken generator last month, and he’s already debating dumping it in a nearby bush so he can leave faster.
He’s scanning the booths for his deadbeat client when he spots her. The woman from the hardware store. The one who’s shown up at 8:17am every Saturday for the past three months, same time as him, always buying a single can of matte white spray paint and a pack of sandpaper, always giving him a quick, half-smirked nod before heading out. He’d asked the hardware store clerk about her once, offhand, and the guy told him she was married to the county commissioner, the same pompous jackass who just pushed through a zoning ordinance that would force Elias to pay a $12,000 annual operating fee for his barn shop, or shut down entirely. He’d written off any chance of talking to her after that, both out of principle and his own long-ingrained habit of avoiding anything that could disrupt his rigid, carefully curated solo routine. He hasn’t so much as had a coffee with a woman since his ex-wife left him eight years prior, convinced he’s better off with no one to let down, no one to disappoint him.
His first instinct is to lie, mumble an excuse, and walk away. He’s half disgusted with himself for even noticing her, for letting the brush of her arm send a jolt up his spine that he hasn’t felt in close to a decade. But the words stick in his throat. “That obvious, huh?” he says, and he huffs a laugh he didn’t know he had in him. She laughs too, and when she does, she leans in again, her shoulder pressing against his for half a second. She tells him her name is Lila, that she just filed for divorce from the commissioner two weeks prior, that she hates the zoning law as much as he does—she runs a small custom furniture refinishing business out of her garage, and the fee would put her out of work too. She admits she’s been showing up to the hardware store at 8:17am on purpose for three months, ever since she saw the custom “Voss Camper Restorations” sticker on the back of his beat-up Ford F-150. She inherited a 1972 Airstream from her dad last year, and she’s been trying to work up the nerve to ask him to help her restore it.
He’s still processing that, still reeling from the fact that the taboo he’d built up in his head was nothing more than a wrong assumption, when she lifts her hand, slow, like she’s giving him time to pull away, and wipes a smudge of brisket sauce off his right cheek with the pad of her thumb. Her fingers linger on his jaw for two beats, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t step back. “I’ve got a test batch of peach hard seltzer back at my cottage up the road,” she says, tilting her head toward the exit. “Way quieter than this mess. We could talk about the Airstream. Or not. Whatever you want.”
For a split second, he thinks about saying no. Thinks about the Winnebago waiting for him back at the barn, about the 6am black coffee he has pre-measured in his coffee pot, about the routine he’s built to keep himself safe from disappointment. But then he looks at her, at the way the sun catches the gold streaks in her brown hair, at the smudge of barbecue sauce still on her jaw, and he nods.
He tosses the half-drunk IPA in a nearby trash can on the way to his truck. He holds the passenger door open for her, and she slides in, setting her seltzer in the cup holder, leaning over to twist the radio dial until Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” hums through the old speakers. Her knee brushes his thigh when she sits back, and he turns the key in the ignition, pulling out of the crowded parking lot without a second thought about the deadbeat client he came to find.
