Leo Rios, 52, makes his living pulling rusted 1970s Hondas out of barns and turning them into machines that purr so smooth you could balance a nickel on the gas tank at full throttle. He’s avoided every local community event since his wife left him for a timeshare sales rep eight years prior, figuring small talk and overcooked potluck food were not worth leaving his garage, where the only noise he had to listen to was the whine of a socket wrench and old Johnny Cash records. His neighbor all but dragged him to the fire department chili cookoff that Saturday, saying if he spent one more weekend alone drinking bourbon and watching 1980s motocross tapes he was going to turn into a permanent hermit.
He was leaning against the bed of his beat-up work van, half-finished bowl of five-alarm chili in one hand and a cold Pabst in the other, when he spotted her. Mara. His ex-wife’s younger cousin, 10 years his junior, the one he’d always made a point of avoiding at family gatherings back when he was married, because looking at her too long felt like stealing something he had no right to touch. She was wearing frayed cutoff shorts and a faded AC/DC tee that had a hole at the shoulder, work boots caked in mud from her job at the community garden, her red hair pulled back in a messy braid dotted with dandelion fluff. She spotted him before he could duck behind the van, and she grinned, weaving through the crowd of firemen and screaming kids to get to him.
She leaned in to hug him before he could protest, her shoulder brushing his chest, the smell of coconut sunscreen and cigarette smoke mixing with the hickory smoke coming off the cookoff grills. He stood stiff for half a second before he relaxed, his hand hovering at the small of her back for a beat too long before he pulled away. She sat on the edge of his van’s tailgate, patting the spot next to her, and he sat, their knees knocking when she shifted to grab a beer out of the cooler at his feet. She told him she’d dropped off her dad’s old CB750 at his shop two weeks prior, that the kid at the front desk had told her Leo was the only person in the state who could fix the finicky carburetor without charging her an arm and a leg. He’d known it was her bike, of course, had spent three extra hours sanding the rust off the handlebars when no one was looking, had told the kid to charge her half price. He didn’t admit that.
They talked for 40 minutes, the noise of the fire siren test and the announcer yelling out chili contest winners fading into background static. She leaned in every time he talked, her elbow brushing his, her green eyes locked on his like he was saying something far more interesting than a story about a CB he’d pulled out of a cow pasture last spring. When he laughed at a joke she made about his ex-wife’s terrible meatloaf, she reached out and wiped a smudge of chili off his jaw with her thumb, the callus on the tip of her finger from playing guitar catching on his stubble. For half a second he froze, the part of his brain that had spent 15 years telling himself she was off limits screaming that he should pull away, make an excuse, leave. The other part of him, the part that hadn’t felt a woman’s touch in longer than he cared to admit, was screaming louder.
He didn’t pull away. He lifted his hand, wrapped his fingers around her wrist for a beat, his calloused mechanic’s fingers brushing the soft skin on the inside of her arm, and he told her he’d known that CB was hers the second the kid wheeled it into the shop. She smiled, slow, and she said she’d stopped by the shop every Saturday for a month, hanging around the front desk pretending to look at parts until he left for the day, too nervous to go back and talk to him. She asked if he wanted to head back to the shop now, take a look at that carburetor, maybe crack open another beer while they worked.
He didn’t hesitate. He tossed his half-eaten chili bowl in the trash next to the cooler, grabbed his keys out of his pocket, and nodded. She followed him out of the fairgrounds in her beat-up Ford pickup, her headlights glowing in his rearview mirror the whole drive back to the shop. He unlocked the roll-up garage door, flipping on the overhead lights, the familiar smell of motor oil and metal polish wrapping around him. She stepped in behind him, her shoulder brushing his as she passed, and reached out to run her hand along the handlebars of her CB, propped up on the lift in the middle of the room.
