Elias Voss, 52, makes his living restoring vintage travel trailers out of a converted barn 10 minutes outside Buda, Texas, and he’s spent the last eight years cultivating a very specific kind of boring, gossip-proof routine. Wake at 6 a.m., feed his hound dog Mabel, sand down aluminum siding until his knuckles are raw, drink three bottles of Shiner Bock after closing, go to bed alone. He’d skipped the town’s annual chili cookoff every year since his wife left him for a custom pool table salesman, sick of well-meaning old ladies shoving their nieces’ phone numbers in his hand and strangers asking too many personal questions over bowls of over-seasoned beef. He only agreed to man his best friend Jimmie’s booth this year because Jimmie broke his wrist falling off a ladder hanging Christmas lights and bribed him with a full year of free brisket at his smokehouse.
The day is sticky, chili powder stinging the back of his throat, Johnny Cash covers twanging tinny from the stage at the end of the park, crushed corn chips crunching under every pair of boots that pass his booth. Jimmie’s chili is way too spicy, he realizes 20 minutes in, people taking one bite and reaching for a water bottle so fast they’re spilling soda on the folding table. The woman running the booth next to his, the new town librarian who moved in three months prior, snorts when a teenaged kid coughs so hard he snorts chili out his nose, and leans over the shared rail to pass Elias a stack of extra napkins. Her name is Lila, he remembers, from the one time he dropped off a box of old National Geographic issues he found in a 1958 Airstream he was gutting. She’s got flecks of amber in her dark brown eyes, vanilla lotion that cuts through the chili and smoke smell hanging in the air, and when they both reach for the same plastic spoon a minute later, their knuckles brush, and she holds eye contact a beat longer than polite before she pulls her hand back, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
He tells himself to keep his distance. Knows if he so much as buys her a beer, half the town will be talking about it at the grocery store by Monday, and he’s worked too hard to stay off the rumor mill to throw that away now. But she keeps drifting over, bringing him a cold sweet tea when she notices he’s sweating through his flannel, making fun of Jimmie’s terrible chili recipe, asking him questions about the trailers he restores. She tells him she fixes old leather-bound books in her spare time, rebinding spines that have cracked and fallen apart, same as he patches holes in aluminum siding and replaces rotted floorboards. They’re both in the business of bringing discarded things back to life, she says, and he can’t remember the last time someone got that part of him without him having to explain it first.
The sun goes down, string lights strung between oak trees turning the whole park gold, most of the crowd filtering out once the prize winners are announced. Rain starts spitting, light at first, then coming down harder, and they’re both scrambling to pack up their booths before everything gets soaked. When she leans down to pick up a heavy cooler full of leftover toppings, her boot slips on a patch of wet grass, and he reaches out automatically, catching her around the waist to steady her. She’s lighter than he expects, her hand fisting in the front of his flannel to keep her balance, and for three seconds neither of them moves, rain dripping off the brim of his hat onto her shoulder, her breath warm against his neck. She tilts her chin up, and he kisses her before he can talk himself out of it, tastes cherry lip balm and the lime from the margarita she was drinking earlier, no one around to see except Mabel, who’s curled up under the table snoring.
He pulls back, half expecting her to slap him, half already mentally drafting an apology, but she laughs, swats him playfully on the chest, and asks if he’s got a towel in his truck to dry off her arms. He does, and when they finish loading the last of the booth supplies into their respective vehicles, he leans against the door of his beat-up F-150 and asks her if she wants to come back to his barn, see the 1962 Airstream he’s restoring for a couple from Austin, the one with the original turquoise countertops. She says yes, climbs into the passenger seat without hesitation, Mabel crawling up to sit between them and nudge her hand for scratches. He pulls out of the parking lot, rain tapping steady on the windshield, an old Waylon Jennings song playing low on the radio, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t care if any of the stragglers hanging around the park see them leave together.
