Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living rebuilding vintage outboard motors out of the cinder block garage behind his northern Michigan lake cottage. He’s avoided the town’s annual summer block party every year since his divorce eight years prior, hates the loud cover bands, the small talk with people who still ask how his ex is doing, the way everyone feels entitled to comment on how he “let himself go” by skipping haircuts and wearing work boots everywhere even on weekends. His next door neighbor bullies him into going this year, says he owes Manny for fixing his 1990 Lund motor for free last spring, so Manny shows up in a faded Sturgis t-shirt, grease still crusted under the edges of his fingernails even after three rounds of scrubbing with Lava soap, holding a cold Modelo he grabbed from the cooler by the taco truck.
They end up sitting on the curb at the edge of the party, away from the crowd, passing a bag of spicy chicharrones back and forth. He tells her about the 1957 Evinrude he’s restoring for a client down in Grand Rapids, the way he spent three weeks tracking down a replacement carburetor from a junkyard in northern Minnesota. She doesn’t roll her eyes or say it sounds like a waste of time, like his ex always did. She leans in, elbows on her knees, asks him to explain how the old two-stroke motors run different than the new fuel-injected ones, like she actually cares about the answer. When he passes her a napkin to wipe chili powder off her chin, their fingers brush for half a second, and he feels a sharp, warm jolt up his arm he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager sneaking into the local drive-in with girls from his high school.
He’s torn for ten whole minutes, warring between the gruff voice in his head that says this is a terrible idea, that she’s family of his ex, that everyone in this tiny town will gossip until their ears fall off, and the softer part of him that’s been lonely for so long he forgot what it feels like to talk to someone who doesn’t just see him as the guy who fixes boat motors cheap. She mentions she’s been looking for old broken motor parts to use as weighted bases for large outdoor clay sculptures, and he says he’s got a whole pile of scrap parts in the back of his garage he’s been meaning to haul to the dump for months. She grins, her eyes crinkling at the corners, and asks if he’ll show her tonight, says she’s got a six pack of the glass-bottled Mexican Coke he used to hoard at family cookouts back when he was married, she remembered. He hesitates for half a second, then says yes.
