Elias Voss, 53, makes his living restoring vintage camper vans out of a cinder block shop on the edge of Boone, North Carolina. He’s avoided the town’s annual spring food truck festival for six straight years, but his old college roommate runs the brisket truck, and guilt won out over his hatred of crowded sidewalks and overpriced lemonade. He’s wearing a faded gray flannel dotted with old paint and transmission fluid stains, work boots caked with mud from the week’s jobs, and he’s half a mind to cut out early when the line for BBQ stops moving for ten whole minutes.
A sharp bump to his right shoulder sends a splash of cold peach lemonade soaking into the cuff of his flannel. He turns, ready to snap, and stops short. The woman in front of him is holding a dented mason jar, cheeks pink with embarrassment, her dark hair pulled back in a braid streaked with a single strand of silver at the temple. She’s wearing canvas overalls over a thin white tee, and there’s faint smudge of book glue on her jaw—he recognizes it, he’s had the same glue under his nails a hundred times from patching up old camper interior manuals. She steps close, close enough that he can smell lavender soap and cedar sachets on her clothes, and dabs at the wet spot on his sleeve with a crumpled napkin from her pocket. Her knuckles brush the hair on his forearm, and he feels a jolt he hasn’t felt in seven years, not since his ex-wife loaded her suitcases into a brand new Class A RV and drove off with the guy who owned the luxury dealership across town.
He’s already forming the brusque “it’s fine, don’t worry about it” he uses to brush off strangers when she says, “You’re Elias, right? The van restorer on Main Street? I’ve walked past your shop a dozen times. I inherited a 1972 Westfalia from my dad last year, and I’ve been too scared to ask anyone to look at it. Most guys around here just want to chop it up and flip it for twice what it’s worth.”
His first instinct is to lie, tell her he’s booked solid for six months, that he doesn’t take private client work anymore. He’s stuck to that rule for years, ever since a client cried when he finished restoring her late husband’s van and he realized how easy it was to get tangled up in other people’s messy, fragile memories. But then she holds up her hand, and he sees the grease under her fingernails, the same kind of ground-in grime he spends ten minutes scrubbing off every night before dinner. She’s the new town librarian, he remembers, someone told him she fixes old leather-bound books in her spare time.
The line for BBQ moves up eventually, and he buys her a brisket sandwich, she buys him another mason jar of peach lemonade. They sit until the sun dips low behind the mountains, and the crowd starts to thin out. He pulls a crumpled receipt from his pocket, scribbles his personal cell number on the back, not the shop line he gives to fleet clients. “Bring the van by Saturday at 8 a.m.,” he says, pushing the receipt across the table. “No charge for the estimate. We can pull the engine apart together, if you want. You look like you know your way around a wrench.”
She tucks the receipt into the front pocket of her overalls, leans across the table, and presses a quick, soft kiss to the corner of his mouth. Her lip gloss tastes like peach, same as the lemonade. She waves over her shoulder as she walks toward the parking lot, and he sits there for a minute, twisting the empty mason jar in his hands, watching the string lights strung between the oak trees flicker on one by one.
