Rico Marquez, 53, has run his vintage camper restoration shop out of a cinder block garage on the edge of town for 12 years. Calluses crisscross his palms from sanding fiberglass, patching aluminum frame cracks, and prying rusted water pumps loose from 1960s Airstream underbellies. He’s skipped the Maple Street block party seven years running, ever since his ex-wife moved to Bend with a real estate agent she’d met at a cookout. This year he only showed up because old Tom Henderson owed him $400 for the split-window VW Bus door he’d spent three weeks patching, sanding, and repainting sunflower yellow to match Tom’s resto project. He planned to grab the cash, nod at three people max, and bolt back to his garage and his snoring hound dog before anyone cornered him for free repair estimates.
He’s halfway across the lawn, work boots caked with resin dust, when he spots her leaning against the folding beer table. She’s the new librarian who moved to town three months prior, the one grocery store checkout ladies kept trying to set him up with until he started using self-checkout exclusively. She wears a thrifted linen sundress the color of dried sage, a tiny coffee stain blotted at the hem, silver wire glasses slipping down her nose as she laughs at a joke the teen running the keg tells her. She holds a jar of dill pickles, first place prize for the adult cornhole tournament, in one hand, a spiked seltzer in the other.
She catches him staring. He freezes, tries to pretend he was looking at the bounce house behind her, but trips over a kid’s neon pink scooter and stumbles forward. She catches his elbow before he faceplants into a tray of potato salad. Her palm is cool, calloused along the fingertips, and when she lets go her fingers brush the bare skin of his forearm, leaving a trail of goosebumps he’s embarrassed to notice. “You’re the camper guy, right?” she says, grinning like she already knows the answer. “I’ve been asking about you. Found a 1968 Camper Repair and Maintenance manual in a box of donated books last week, figured you’d get more use out of it than the archive shelf.”
He’s so flustered he can barely get a sentence out. He’s spent the last eight years perfecting short, uninviting answers to personal questions, but she doesn’t let him. She doesn’t flinch at the resin crusted under his fingernails, or the hole in the elbow of his faded Carhartt. She asks specific questions about sealing seam leaks on vintage Airstreams, the best way to patch faded retro decals, and when he tells her he’s restoring a 1967 Overlander for a Portland couple driving it to Alaska, her eyes light up like he just said he won the lottery.
They sit on the curb a few feet from the crowd when the fire dancers start, and her knee knocks his when she leans forward to watch a guy spin a flame-wreathed baton. She smells like lavender and lemon polish, and when she leans in to tell him about a patron who tried to return a 30-year overdue *Where the Wild Things Are* with a dead beetle pressed between pages, her breath is warm against his ear, and he can taste lime from her seltzer on the air between them. He hasn’t talked this much to anyone who isn’t his hound dog in years, and doesn’t even notice when Tom walks up, shoves the $400 in his back pocket, and waggles his eyebrows like he just won a bet.
Fireworks start at 9:30, painting the sky pink, blue, and gold. A particularly loud burst makes her flinch, and she leans into his side, her shoulder pressing against his bicep. He doesn’t move away. For eight years he’d told himself he liked being alone, that dating at his age was nothing but messy drama and unmet expectations, that he didn’t need anyone messing up his routine of early mornings, resin fumes, and frozen burritos for dinner. But right then, with fireworks popping in his ears, the crowd’s low hum around them, and the soft weight of her against his arm, he realizes he’d been lying to himself.
He asks her to come by his shop tomorrow, see the Overlander he’s working on. He already has three copies of that 1968 repair manual, but he says he’d love to compare editions over fresh iced coffee, the good stuff he hides for rare visitors. She says yes, grinning, tucking a strand of silver-streaked hair behind her ear, and scribbles her number on the back of a crumpled cornhole score sheet, smudging the last two digits a little when she hands it to him.
He stays for the rest of the fireworks, the after-party bonfire, even lets a kid drag him over for a round of cornhole he loses badly. He never thinks to make an excuse to leave early. When she catches him looking at her across the bonfire an hour later, she winks, and he tucks the smudged score sheet into his Carhartt’s inner pocket, where it won’t get crumpled under his wrenches when he gets back to the shop.
