Royce Higginbotham, 59, has made a steady living for two decades restoring vintage travel trailers out of a cinder block shop tucked between two pine thickets 10 minutes outside of Mars Hill, North Carolina. He’s broad-shouldered, with calluses crusted into the pads of his fingers from sanding aluminum siding and patching water-damaged wood paneling, and his default expression is a half-scowl he picked up after his wife left him 8 years prior for a crystal-healing influencer who sold CBD dog treats out of a converted school bus. His biggest flaw, if you ask the few people who still talk to him regularly, is that he’s convinced every pair of eyes in the 2,700-person town is just waiting for him to embarrass himself again, so he avoids any public gathering that doesn’t involve dropping off a finished trailer or picking up parts.
That’s how he ends up at the weekly community beer garden against his will, dragged there by a retired teacher who’s been paying him to restore a 1972 Airstream Sovereign for her cross-country retirement trip. The air smells like charred bratwurst, pine resin, and the faint sour tang of cheap IPA poured from a dented keg. The picnic tables are scuffed with decades of use, the neon “BEER GARDEN” sign strung between two oak trees buzzes so loud you can hear it 20 feet away, and Royce is already counting the minutes until he can sneak back to his shop, put on an old John Wayne Western, and sand a dinette table in peace.
He’s halfway through his first plastic cup of beer when he catches her staring. She’s the new county librarian, moved up from Miami three months prior, and he’s heard every wild rumor floating around the diner about her: she put up a banned book display in the front entry her first week, she rides a neon pink motorcycle to work, she once told a local preacher to “mind his own damn business” when he complained about the YA section carrying queer coming-of-age novels. He’d dropped off a stack of 1970s camping magazines he’d found in the back of a junked Winnebago at the library two weeks prior, and she’d smiled at him then, bright and unapologetic, and he’d stumbled over his own boots on the way out.
She’s leaning against the edge of a picnic table 10 feet away, sipping a lime seltzer, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a faded Dolly Parton t-shirt, and she holds his eye contact for a full three seconds longer than polite small-town etiquette allows before she smirks, like she can tell he’s flustered. He looks down at his beer, cheeks hot, and tells himself he’s being an idiot. He’s 59 years old, he hasn’t flirted with anyone since his divorce was finalized, and the whole town would talk for months if they saw him so much as say hello to her.
He stands up a few minutes later to get a second beer, and his boot catches on the leg of a cooler someone left sitting by the table. He stumbles forward, arms windmilling, and his right hand wraps around her upper arm to steady himself before he can think twice. Her skin is warm, sun-kissed even in the cool dusk air, and a thin silver bracelet strung with tiny turquoise beads clinks against his wrist when he makes contact. He pulls his hand back immediately, stammering an apology, and she laughs, loud and unselfconscious, and reaches out to pat his arm to let him know it’s fine.
“Relax, I don’t bite,” she says, and he can smell coconut shampoo and the faint, sweet scent of peppermint gum on her breath when she leans in a little to be heard over the chatter of the crowd. “You’re the trailer guy, right? The one who dropped off those old camping magazines? I’ve been using them for a display on cross-country road trips. People love ‘em.”
He nods, unable to get words out at first, because she’s standing so close their shoulders are almost touching, and he can see flecks of gold in her dark brown eyes if he looks close enough. He’s torn between the urge to run back to his truck and lock himself in his shop for a week, and the urge to ask her if she wants to get out of the crowd, away from all the gossiping neighbors who would jump at the chance to spread a story about the hermit trailer restorer and the “wild” new librarian.
She beats him to it. “You wanna walk down to the creek behind the center?” she asks, nodding toward the tree line at the edge of the parking lot. “I saw fireflies there earlier. Way quieter than this mess.”
He hesitates for half a second, thinks about all the people who are definitely watching them right now, thinks about how embarrassed he was when everyone was talking about his wife leaving him, thinks about how he told himself he’d never let anyone get close to him again. Then he nods.
The gravel crunches under their work boots as they walk toward the tree line, and the noise of the beer garden fades behind them, replaced by the gurgle of the creek and the high, thin chirp of crickets in the underbrush. Fireflies blink on and off in the dark between the trees, and when they get to the bank of the creek, she sits down on a fallen oak log, patting the spot next to her so he’ll sit down too.
They talk for an hour, first about the library’s banned book display and the angry emails she’s gotten from local parents, then about the 1968 Winnebago he’s restoring for a couple who plan to drive it all the way to Alaska, then about how they both hate the way small towns act like everyone’s business is public property. She leans against his shoulder halfway through the story about the preacher complaining about the YA section, and he tenses up for half a second before he relaxes, wrapping his arm around her shoulders so she can lean more comfortably. Her hair is soft against his neck, and he doesn’t even think about the people back at the beer garden, or the rumors that will probably start floating around the diner tomorrow, or the fact that he swore off any kind of connection years ago.
Somewhere up the hill, a local bluegrass band strikes up a slow, twangy cover of a 1990s country ballad, and he doesn’t even think about checking his phone to see what time it is.
