Roy Hargrove, 58, has restored 117 vintage campers in the eight years since his divorce. He’s got grease under his fingernails that never fully washes out, a hound dog named Muffin who rides shotgun in his beat-up Ford F-150, and a firm rule that he doesn’t date. His ex-wife left him for a commercial real estate broker who wore tailored suits and called Roy’s work “a hobby for man-children,” so he’d leaned into the gruff, lone-wolf bit hard enough that even his buddies stopped trying to set him up. He’s at the county fire department chili cookoff on a crisp October Saturday, nursing a cheap lager, when he spots her.
She’s Clara, the new part-time librarian who moved to town three months prior, and he’s avoided her like the flu ever since he checked out a tattered 1987 Harlequin romance at the front desk two weeks prior, too flustered to explain it was for his 92-year-old aunt Mabel in assisted living who can’t see well enough to pick her own books anymore. He’d been sure she’d laugh about it with the other town gossips, but she’d just smiled and slid the book across the counter, no comment. Now she’s walking straight toward him, holding a paper plate stacked with cornbread, and Roy’s throat goes dry.
He takes too big a bite of the extra-spicy chili he’d grabbed from the firehouse booth, and burns his tongue so bad his eyes water. She laughs when she gets close, the sound warm and bright over the hum of the crowd and the crackle of the charcoal grills. “You look like you need this,” she says, holding out a cold can of lemonade. Her fingers brush his when he takes it, and he notices her nail polish is chipped indigo, not the boring nude he’d expected from a woman who spends her days reshelving books. “Was helping my 16-year-old niece dye her hair last night,” she says, noticing him staring, wiggling her fingers. “Stained everything. My couch, my favorite sweater, even the cat’s paw.”
A fire truck siren blares as a crew pulls out for a false alarm down the road, and she leans in to talk over the noise, her shoulder pressing firm to his bicep. He smells lavender and pine from her shampoo, no heavy, cloying perfume, and he has to fight the urge to lean into the contact. She teases him about the romance novel first, right off the bat, and he tenses up, ready to mumble an excuse, before she grins. “I saw the address label on the envelope you had sticking out of your pocket,” she says, holding eye contact so long he has to look away first, cheeks hot. “Assisted living on Oak Street. Figured it wasn’t for you. Didn’t want to embarrass you in front of the regulars.”
The admission makes something tight in his chest loosen, and he finds himself talking more than he has to anyone who isn’t Muffin or a customer in months. He tells her about the 1972 Airstream he’s restoring right now, the one that had a family of raccoons living in the overhead cabinets for three years, the one that still smells like wet fur no matter how many times he scrubs the walls. She tells him about the kid who comes into the library every Tuesday after school to check out dinosaur encyclopedias, who can name every species of pterosaur off the top of his head. He’s torn the whole time, half of him itching to make an excuse and leave before he does something stupid, the other half rooted to the spot, not wanting the conversation to end. He’s spent eight years telling himself relationships are nothing but hassle, that he’s better off alone with his campers and his fishing trips, that any woman his age is just looking for someone to pay their bills or take care of them when they get old. He’s disgusted with himself for even wanting to ask her anything more personal, for feeling giddy like a teenager when she laughs at his dumb raccoon joke.
The emcee calls the raffle winners over the loudspeaker ten minutes later, and Roy blinks when he hears his name. He’d bought a ticket on a lark, forgot all about it. The prize is a free weekend stay at a tiny cabin up on Craggy Mountain, the one with the porch that overlooks the Blue Ridge Parkway, the one he’s wanted to rent for years but never bothered to, since it felt stupid to go alone. He holds the crumpled raffle ticket in his hand, looks over at Clara who’s grinning and clapping for him, and the words are out of his mouth before he can think better of them. “You wanna come with me?” he says, voice gruffer than he means it to be. “I can bring the camp stove, make blueberry pancakes. There’s a hiking trail up to a waterfall there I’ve been meaning to check out.”
He holds his breath, waiting for her to say no, for her to laugh and tell him he’s out of his mind. But she nods, dimples popping, and pulls her phone out of her jacket pocket. “I’ve been bugging my sister to hike that trail with me for months, but she’s too busy with her kids,” she says, typing her number into his old flip phone when he hands it over. Her thumb brushes his knuckle when she passes it back, and she squeezes his wrist once, light and deliberate, before she turns to go help the other volunteers clean up the dessert table.
Roy shoves his phone back into his jeans pocket, stares at her across the lawn as she swats a wasp away from a tray of peach pie, laughing when one of the firefighters hands her a plastic fork and a slice. Muffin trots over from where she’d been begging for scraps at the next booth, drops a chewed neon green tennis ball at his feet, and he kicks it gently across the grass, his tongue still tingling a little from the spicy chili, his chest light enough he feels like he could float.
