Elias Voss, 52, has restored 117 vintage campers in the eight years since his wife packed her designer bags and moved to Palm Beach with the guy who sold them their lake house. He runs his shop out of a weathered red barn 20 minutes outside Asheville, wears the same faded charcoal Carhartt every day even when summer humidity sticks the fabric to his back, and limits his weekly social interactions to 20-minute check-ins with his fishing buddy Ray and Thursday night trips to the downtown food truck rally for brisket tacos and cold IPA. He’s stubborn to a fault, still holds a grudge against the local hardware store that raised their lumber prices last spring, refuses to let anyone else set foot in his kitchen to cook, and has turned down every blind date Ray’s wife has set him up on, convinced any romantic attention is just a lead-in to a discount on a camper reno.
The May air smells like cut grass and smoked pork when he leans against the dented side of his 1994 F-150, half-eaten taco in one hand, sweating IPA can in the other, the aluminum cold and sticky against his palm. The string lights strung between the oak trees fuzz a little at the edges from the humidity, crickets chirp loud enough to compete with the food truck speakers blaring old Tom Petty, and he’s just about to take another bite when a warm shoulder brushes his.
He turns, and for a second he thinks he’s hallucinating. It’s Lila. His ex-wife’s cousin. He hasn’t seen her in six years, not since the Christmas family gathering where she called out his ex for snapping at him for burning the ham. She’s got sun-bleached blonde hair half tied up with a blue bandana, wears cutoff denim shorts and a faded Fleetwood Mac tee, and smells like jasmine hand lotion and the lime seltzer she’s holding, which fizzes soft over the edge of the can when she waves hello. She stands so close he can feel the heat off her arm, and when she grins, the same crinkles around her hazel eyes he remembers from his bachelor party are still there, teasing.
“Still wearing that raggedy Carhartt?” she says, nodding at the oil stain on the sleeve he got fixing a 1968 Winnebago last month. “I swear you had that exact same shirt the day you married Kara.”
Elias laughs, half nervous, half warm. He’d had a stupid, useless crush on Lila the first time he met her, when she showed up to his bachelor party and called him out for being too chicken to take a shot of tequila with the groomsmen. He’d felt guilty about it for 12 years of marriage, pushed it so far down he almost forgot it existed, but now it’s bubbling back up fast, hot and sharp in his chest. He feels a flicker of disgust with himself, too—she’s Kara’s family, that’s a line he never thought he’d even consider crossing.
She sits on the edge of his truck’s tailgate, pats the spot next to her, and he sits before he can talk himself out of it. Their knees press together through the thin fabric of their jeans, and he freezes for half a second before forcing himself to relax. She tells him she just finalized her own divorce three months prior, moved to Asheville last week to open a small plant shop downtown, just bought a beat-up 1972 Airstream she wants to turn into a mobile pop-up for rare succulents. When she reaches for the extra napkin he’s holding in his lap, her fingers brush his, and he feels a jolt up his spine he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager sneaking makeout sessions in the back of his first truck.
They talk for 45 minutes, the tacos going cold on the tailgate next to them, the food truck crowd thinning out as the sun dips pink below the skyline. She leans in so close when he tells a story about a retired vet who asked him to install a fishing rod rack in his 1970 Scotty that her hair brushes his cheek, and he doesn’t pull away. He makes a dumb joke about a customer who insisted he install a disco ball above the camper bed, and she laughs so hard she snorts, clapping a hand over her mouth like she’s embarrassed. Elias thinks it’s the best sound he’s heard in years.
“I was gonna ask around for a camper restorer,” she says, turning to face him, their knees still pressed together, and she holds eye contact so long he feels his ears go pink. “But I’d rather it be you. And I don’t just mean for the Airstream.”
Elias blinks. For a second he can’t talk, the guilt and the desire warring so loud in his head he can barely hear the crickets anymore. He admits he’s had a crush on her since that bachelor party, that he felt like a creep for it for years even after Kara left, that he never thought he’d get to say it out loud. She laughs, soft, and says she knew. That’s why she avoided coming around when he was married, why she drove past his shop three times this week before working up the nerve to come find him at the rally.
He offers her the last bite of his taco, and she takes it, her fingers brushing his again, and this time he doesn’t flinch. A group of kids runs past, screaming, chasing a food truck employee handing out free cherry popsicles, and they both laugh. When she leans her head on his shoulder for half a second, he doesn’t pull away. He tells her he can come look at the Airstream tomorrow morning at 9, brings coffee and glazed donuts from the little shop down the street from his barn, her favorite, the kind with rainbow sprinkles she used to sneak at family holidays.
He tucks a stray strand of her hair behind her ear, and when she grins up at him, he already knows he’s gonna have the Airstream’s floor panels replaced a full week ahead of her requested deadline.
