Rafe Mendez, 57, has restored 19 vintage Airstreams and Avion trailers in the six years since he retired from the Oregon wildland fire crew, and he’d rather sand rust off aluminum framing for 12 hours straight than make small talk at a community event. His niece, home from college for the summer, practically dragged him to the west side food truck rally that Thursday evening, complaining he hadn’t spoken to anyone who wasn’t a parts store clerk in three months. He’d given in mostly to stop her nagging, tucked a worn Carhartt jacket over his faded fire crew tee even when the sun was still high enough to raise a sweat on his forearms, and perched on a split-rail fence at the edge of the crowd, picking at a smoked brisket taco and counting down the minutes until he could leave.
He’s halfway through mentally mapping the floorplan of the 1972 Avion he’s stripping down for a client in Seattle when a shoulder brushes his bicep, soft and warm, and the scent of coconut sunscreen and pine resin wraps around him before he hears the laugh. He knows that laugh. He’d know it in a room full of screaming people, in the middle of a fire line, in the dead of a silent winter storm. He turns, and there’s Lila Marquez, widow of his best friend Jesse, who died on a fire call outside Klamath Falls 10 years prior. He hasn’t seen her in six years, not since she packed up the house she shared with Jesse and moved to Portland to open a custom woodworking shop.
Her blonde hair is streaked more silver than he remembers, tied back with a frayed leather thong, and she’s wearing cutoffs that show the scar on her left knee from the time the three of them went four-wheeling in the Ochoco Mountains and she flipped an ATV. There’s a faint coffee stain on the hem of her white tank top, a flannel tied around her waist that he swears used to be Jesse’s, and she’s holding a mango seltzer, the same brand she used to bring to every crew cookout back in the day. She grins, and the crinkles around her hazel eyes are exactly the same. “I’d know that busted knuckle anywhere,” she says, nodding at the thick, raised scar across his left hand, from when a trailer frame slipped and crushed it last spring. She reaches for the extra napkin he’s holding in that hand, and her fingers brush the scar, light as a pine needle, and he flinches like he’s been burned.
He doesn’t know what to say. For 10 years, he’s avoided her on purpose, told himself reaching out would be disrespectful, that Jesse would hate him for even looking at her the way he sometimes did, back when the three of them were younger, back when he was still married, back before the fire took Jesse and his wife left him for a Portland real estate agent in the same month. He’d spent three months working on the Airstream Jesse and Lila had commissioned as their retirement travel rig, and when Jesse died, he’d parked it in the back of his shop, half-finished, and never touched it again. He’d sent her the refund check for their deposit, and never replied to the three emails she sent him after that.
She doesn’t push when he goes quiet, just leans against the fence next to him, close enough that her arm stays pressed to his, and rambles about how she’s in town visiting her sister, how she heard he was restoring trailers full time, how she still thinks about the time he accidentally dyed his hair neon orange trying to cover the gray before Jesse’s bachelor party. He laughs before he can stop himself, and the tight knot in his chest loosens a little. She teases him about still wearing the same Carhartt he’s had since 2013, the one with the burn hole on the sleeve from a controlled burn gone wrong, and he teases her back about still drinking that godawful mango seltzer that tastes like candy dish scraps. The hum of the food truck generators fades into background noise, the smell of grilled elote and smoked pork mixes with her sunscreen, and he forgets he was counting down the minutes to leave.
He doesn’t say anything for a long minute, just wraps his arm around her waist, his calloused palm resting on the bare skin of her hip above the waistband of her cutoffs. He’d spent 10 years telling himself this was wrong, that wanting this made him a bad friend, that he deserved to be alone for even thinking about it. But sitting there, with her warm against him, the sun dipping below the pine trees and painting the sky pink and tangerine, the guilt feels smaller than it ever has. Small enough to ignore, for once.
She tilts her face up to his, and he can feel her breath on his jaw, mint and mango, before she kisses him, slow, no hurry. He kisses her back, his hand splayed across her back, and he doesn’t overthink it, doesn’t spiral into all the reasons he shouldn’t. When she pulls back, she brushes a strand of gray hair off his forehead, and smiles. “You ever finish that Airstream we commissioned?” she asks.
He nods. “Parked it in the back of the shop. Got most of it done last year. Was gonna sell it, but never got around to it.”
“Show me,” she says, standing up, and laces her fingers through his scarred left hand, her own calloused from years of planing wood and running power tools.
He stands, doesn’t let go of her hand, and starts walking back toward the parking lot where his beat up Ford F150 is parked, the faint sound of the Cash cover drifting through the pine trees behind them.
