Manny Ruiz, 53, has restored 27 vintage travel trailers in the six years he’s lived outside La Grande, Oregon, and he’s avoided all non-work small talk for every single one of those days. He’s got a scar slicing through his left eyebrow from a logging accident in his 20s, a habit of wearing heavy flannel even on 90-degree days, and a hard rule about not getting involved with anyone local—divorced seven years prior, he’d watched his ex turn their split into three months of front-page small town gossip back in his western Washington hometown, and he had zero interest in repeating that mess. The only reason he’s at the Fourth of July street fair at all is because his 16-year-old niece, in town for the regional 4-H competition, texted him begging to pick up her rabbit show first place plaque while she stayed late to help clean the livestock pens.
He’s leaning against a rough cedar fence post, sweat dripping down the back of his neck and soaking the collar of his gray flannel, when someone slams into his left side hard enough to make him fumble the crinkly plastic water bottle in his hand. He looks down first, at a dollop of golden peach cobbler oozing down the front of his shirt, then up, into the face of Clara Bennett, the librarian who lives three properties down from him, the woman he’s only ever exchanged stiff, quick driveway waves with for three full years. Her dark auburn hair is pulled back in a messy braid slipping loose at the temples, a smudge of cobbler on her left cheek, and she’s clutching a crumpled paper napkin in one hand, the other still pressed to his bicep where she’d grabbed him to steady herself.
“Christ, I’m so sorry,” she says, and her voice is lower than he expected, rougher, like she spends half her day reading out loud to groups of squirming elementary schoolers. She dabs at the cobbler on his shirt first, her fingers cool from holding a frosted lemonade cup slick with condensation, and the tip of her thumb brushes the skin just above his belt line for half a second before she pulls back like she’s been burned. He can smell lavender perfume on her, mixed with the charcoal smoke from the BBQ food truck 20 feet away and the sweet, sticky scent of cotton candy drifting from the booth by the entrance, and the tinny sound of the high school marching band playing “Stars and Stripes Forever” fades into muffled background noise for a beat.
His first instinct is to brush it off, mumble a generic “no problem”, and head back to his beat-up F-150 as fast as he can. He’s spent years telling himself he doesn’t need the hassle, that any connection with someone local would just turn into a bunch of retired ladies at the grocery store asking when they’re getting a wedding invite, that the quiet of his pole barn workshop and his half-finished 1972 Airstream renovation is more than enough. But then she laughs, a little flustered, and wipes the cobbler off her own cheek with the back of her hand, and he notices the tiny freckle right above her left eyebrow, the chipped mint-green nail polish on her fingers, the silver moon pendant on the thin chain around her neck.
“Hey, no harm done,” he says before he can think better of it. “I owe you a new cobbler, at least. That one looked better than the sad frozen stuff I keep in my freezer.”
She grins, and she steps closer, close enough that he can feel the heat coming off her bare shoulder through his shirt. “I was heading to the beer garden to grab a handful of napkins and a refill. You wanna join? I’ve been meaning to ask you about that 1968 Scotty I inherited from my dad, anyway. Half the town says you’re the only guy within 100 miles who doesn’t charge an arm and a leg for that kind of work, and who actually cares about the weird little sentimental details.”
He almost says no. Almost. But then her knee brushes his as they start walking, the rubber sole of her white sneakers crunching on discarded popcorn and cotton candy sticks scattered across the warm asphalt, and he can’t bring himself to parrot the excuse he’s rehearsed in his head a hundred times for exactly this scenario.
They sit on a splintered picnic table at the back of the beer garden, and he buys her an icy IPA, buys himself a lime seltzer because he doesn’t drink around people he doesn’t know well, doesn’t like feeling off his guard. The tabletop is sticky with spilled soda under his forearm, and their knees touch under the table the entire time they talk, neither of them shifting away. She tells him about the Scotty, that her dad took her camping in it every summer until he died two years ago, that it’s been sitting in her driveway rotting because she was too scared to let anyone work on it who wouldn’t care about the little hand-painted sunflowers her dad put on the door when she was 10. He tells her about the raccoon family he found living in a trailer he restored last spring, how they’d chewed through all the wiring and made a nest out of a pile of old 90s band t-shirts the previous owner had left behind, and she laughs so hard she snorts, her hand resting on his bicep for three full seconds before she pulls it back like she didn’t even realize she’d done it.
She teases him about the fact that half the town’s had a betting pool going for two years about when he’d finally talk to her, that the ladies at the library had him pegged as a hermit who only talked to his trailer parts and his golden retriever, Max. He admits he’d avoided her specifically because he’d heard the gossip snippets at the hardware store, because he didn’t want to give anyone more material to chatter about over peach pie at the Main Street diner. “We don’t have to tell anyone anything if you don’t want to,” she says, leaning in a little, her voice low enough that no one at the next table can hear over the chatter of the crowd. “Let them keep betting. It’ll be more fun that way.”
The first firework goes off right as she finishes talking, a burst of bright red that lights up the whole darkening sky, and she flinches a little, leaning her shoulder fully against his. He doesn’t overthink it, doesn’t spiral into a list of all the reasons this is a bad idea. He laces his fingers through hers, his calloused, grease-stained work rough against her softer, ink-stained hands (she stamps library books all day, she’d told him earlier, the blue ink never washes all the way off her fingertips). The crowd around them cheers, kids yelling as more fireworks go off, blue and purple and gold, lighting up her face every few seconds as she smiles up at the sky.
When the first booming shell faded into wispy gold sparkles that drifted down toward the fairgrounds, he realized he hadn’t thought once about going home early in over two hours.
