Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living patching rusted floorboards and reupholstering frayed dinette seats in vintage campers out of a cinder block shop off Route 66 in Flagstaff. He’s spent the last eight years avoiding anything that even resembles emotional vulnerability, ever since his ex-wife packed her bags and left a note on his workbench calling his career “a waste of potential for a man who refuses to grow up.” His only consistent companion is a three-legged chihuahua named Rusty, and he’d rather spend a Saturday sanding epoxy than making small talk at any local event, but his buddy who runs the nearby brewery strong-armed him into coming to the fall craft festival, said he owed him a favor for giving him free kegs for the camper show back in June.
He’s leaning against a splintered pine picnic table, holding a cold hazy IPA that sweats through the paper coozie in his hand, half-watching the bluegrass band pluck banjos on the small stage at the edge of the field. The air smells like pine, roasted corn, and spilled beer, crisp enough that the tip of his nose is pink, and his work boots are still dusted with red dirt from fixing a broken axle on a 1968 Shasta that morning. He’s just debating bailing early to go home and order a frozen pizza when he sees Lila Hale walking towards him, and his throat goes tight.
Lila’s 41, the daughter of his old shop mentor Joe, who passed away three months prior from a heart attack. Manny’s known her since she was 12, when she’d traipse into Joe’s shop every Saturday with a pitcher of lemonade and draw pictures of the campers they were working on, braids flying, voice high and squeaky when she’d ask him a million questions about how welders worked. He’d only seen her twice at the funeral, had avoided talking to her longer than necessary because he’d been caught off guard by how much she’d changed: her dark hair now falls in loose waves down her back, she’s got a small tattoo of a wrench on her wrist, and her laugh is low and warm, nothing like the kid he remembered. He’d spent the weeks after the funeral feeling guilty for the stray thoughts that popped into his head, telling himself it was wrong to look at Joe’s daughter that way, that he was too old, too rough around the edges, too set in his lone-wolf routine to be anything but a bad idea for her.
She slides onto the bench next to him, close enough that her shoulder brushes his bicep, and he can smell lavender hand lotion mixed with the vanilla of the spiced cider she’s holding in a paper cup. “I was hoping I’d find you here,” she says, leaning in so he can hear her over the twang of the banjo, her knee brushing his under the table. He flinches a little at the contact, and she smirks, tilting her head. “You’re still as jumpy as you were when I snuck up on you with a rubber snake in Joe’s shop when I was 14, huh?”
He huffs a laugh, rubbing the back of his neck, the grease under his fingernails still faint no matter how many times he washes his hands. “Was starting to think you moved back to Portland for good,” he says, avoiding eye contact for a second, staring at the label of his beer can. She reaches across the table to grab a napkin next to his hand, her forearm brushing his, and he can feel the heat of her skin through his faded flannel shirt.
“Came back to clear out Joe’s shop,” she says, twisting the napkin between her fingers, holding eye contact longer than he expects, her dark eyes glinting in the golden sunset light. “Found a stack of your old welding certifications, a bunch of custom router bits he said you made yourself, figured you’d want them instead of me donating them to the high school shop class. But that’s not the only reason I was looking for you.”
His chest goes tight, and he takes a too-big sip of beer, hops burning the back of his throat. He knows what she’s going to say before she says it, and half of him wants to stand up and leave, to run back to his shop and hide behind a stack of rusted camper parts, tell himself this is wrong, that he’s crossing a line he can’t uncross, that Joe would roll in his grave if he saw what Manny was thinking. The other half of him is leaning in without even realizing it, drawn to the way she’s biting her lower lip like she’s nervous, the way her foot is tapping against his under the table, like she’s trying to tell him she’s just as on edge as he is.
“I’ve had a crush on you since I was 16,” she says, plain as day, like she’s commenting on the weather, no hesitation. “Used to hang around the shop every weekend just to watch you work, thought you were the coolest guy I’d ever met. I thought about telling you a hundred times when I was home from college, but you were married, and I didn’t want to make things weird. Now? My dad always said you were the only good man he ever trusted to do a job right, and I’m not a kid anymore. I’m not gonna waste the chance to say something.”
He stares at her for a long second, the noise of the festival fading into the background, the banjo twang, the laughter of kids running past, the crackle of the fire pit off to the side, all of it distant. He thinks about the last eight years, the empty house, the way he’d stopped even looking at other women, convinced he was too broken, too stuck in his ways to be worth anyone’s time. He thinks about Joe, clapping him on the back when he finished his first full camper restoration, saying “You’re gonna do good things, kid.” He reaches across the table, covers her hand with his, calloused fingers brushing the wrench tattoo on her wrist, and she smiles, soft, like she knew he wasn’t gonna turn her down.
They stay at the festival until the band packs up their equipment, until the sun dips below the San Francisco Peaks and the air gets cold enough that he can see his breath. He gives her his faded Carhartt jacket, too big on her, sleeves hanging past her wrists, and she tugs the collar up to her chin, grinning. He walks her to her beat-up 1998 Ford Ranger parked at the edge of the field, and she stops at the driver’s side door, looping a finger through the belt loop of his work jeans to pull him closer. She kisses him slow, the taste of spiced cider and cherry lip balm on her mouth, and he wraps an arm around her waist, pulling her closer, no hesitation, no guilt, no voice in the back of his head telling him he doesn’t deserve this.
Rusty is curled up on the front porch of his shop when he gets home later, waiting for him, and he pulls out his phone to text Lila that he’s free tomorrow to come pick up the tools from Joe’s shop. He tastes hop and cherry lip balm on his mouth, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel the urge to make an excuse to cancel plans before they even start.
