Elias Voss, 52, makes his living sanding rust out of vintage campers, patching dented aluminum, and rewiring 50-year-old electrical systems that long ago gave up on following code. He’s lived outside Traverse City for 11 years, eight of them alone after his ex-wife left for a SaaS sales rep who wore custom tailored flannel and never had grease under his nails. His biggest flaw is he’d rather spend three days troubleshooting a broken water pump than admit he’s tired of eating frozen burritos for dinner three nights a week.
He’s perched on a sticky pine stool at The Copper Tap on a crisp mid-October Tuesday, sipping a hazy IPA he’d waited three weeks for the local brewery to tap, the air thick with the smell of fried cheese curds and burnt pretzel salt, when the stool next to him scrapes across the floor. He doesn’t look over at first. He’d come here to avoid small talk, not make it. Then he smells jasmine lotion and pine needles, and the edge of a well-worn denim jacket brushes the sleeve of his oil-stained Carhartt flannel, and he knows exactly who it is.
Marisol moved into the little blue cottage three properties down from his three weeks prior. The first time they met, he was hunched over the frame of a 1972 Airstream, covered in aluminum dust, when she showed up on his porch with a Tupperware of beef empanadas and a bright smile. He’d snapped at her that he didn’t need charity, that he could cook his own food, and she’d just raised one eyebrow, turned on her boot, and left without another word. He’d felt like an ass the second the door clicked shut, but he’d been too stubborn to walk over and apologize.
She leans forward to flag the bartender, and her knee brushes his. The fabric of her work pants is soft, worn thin at the knee from kneeling in garden beds—she runs the town’s monthly plant swap, he’d heard from the bartender. She turns to him after she orders her hard cider, and her dark eyes hold his for three full beats, no look away, no awkward smile, just a sharp little smirk that tugs at the corner of her mouth. “You still have that faint grease stain on your left cheek from when I brought you those empanadas,” she says, and he automatically reaches up to scrub at his face, even though he’d washed twice before leaving the shop.
He grunts, takes a long sip of his beer. The jukebox in the corner is playing Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” low enough that they can talk without yelling, loud enough to drown out the group of college kids playing darts in the back. “I was an ass,” he says, before he can think better of it. “Work had been shit that day. The empanadas were good, by the way. I ate them after you left.”
She laughs, a warm, rough sound that makes something tight in his chest loosen a little. Her elbow brushes his when she reaches for her cider, and he doesn’t move away. He’d spent so long building walls around his little compound of half-restored campers and scrap metal that he’d forgotten what it felt like to be close to someone who didn’t want to ask him for a quote or complain about his saw running too early on weekends. She tells him she needs someone to look at the rust on the undercarriage of her 1968 VW bus, the one she drives up to the Upper Peninsula for foraging trips every month, and offers to trade him six months of pothos and snake plants that even he can’t kill, plus a batch of her abuela’s pork tamales, as payment.
His first instinct is to say no. To tell her he’s booked solid for the next two months, that he doesn’t have time for side jobs, that he kills every plant he’s ever touched. But then she leans in, points to the thin silver scar on his left wrist, the one he got when he crashed his motorcycle two weeks after his ex left, and her finger brushes the raised skin for half a second. “That look like a story,” she says, and her voice is soft, no pity, no judgment, just curiosity.
He tells her the story, then. Doesn’t leave out the part where he was drunk, where he drove off the road because he was crying so hard he couldn’t see the lines, where he spent three days in the hospital and didn’t tell a single soul he was there. She listens, doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t tell him he was stupid, just nods, and when he’s done she says, “I get it. I lost my sister to a car crash five years ago. I moved up here because I was tired of everyone in Chicago looking at me like I was about to shatter.”
The bar empties out around them, and by the time the bartender starts wiping down the counter for closing, her knee is pressed solidly against his, their shoulders are almost touching, and he hasn’t checked his phone once in two hours. He walks her to her beat up Ford Ranger, the air so cold their breath fogs in front of their faces, and when they get to her door she reaches up, brushes a crumpled red maple leaf off the shoulder of his flannel, her hand lingering on the collar for a beat longer than necessary.
“Saturday, 10 a.m.,” he says, before she can ask. “I’ll look at the bus. You bring the tamales.” She grins, opens her truck door, and before she climbs in she leans in, presses a quick, warm kiss to his cheek that leaves her jasmine scent clinging to his skin long after she drives away.
He gets in his own truck, turns the heater on full blast, and sits there for five minutes, staring at the empty parking lot. He hasn’t looked forward to a Saturday in almost eight years. He pulls out of the lot, rolls the window down even though the air is freezing, and laughs out loud when he realizes he’s already wondering what kind of plant she’ll bring him first.
