Rafe Mendez, 51, makes his living restoring vintage campers out of a weathered red barn 10 miles outside Mars Hill, North Carolina. He’s spent the last eight years walling himself off from any casual social interaction that doesn’t involve ordering parts or haggling over scrap aluminum, ever since his ex-wife left him for a Charlotte real estate developer who owned three vacation rentals and a boat. He judges the annual Madison County barbecue cookoff’s pork shoulder category every year only because the organizer owes him a free frame-off restoration on his 1965 Winnebago, and he’d rather put up with three hours of small talk than pay for the work himself.
Mid-July humidity hangs thick enough to sip the day of the cookoff, hickory smoke curling low over the fairgrounds, the twang of a local bluegrass band’s banjo mixing with the yells of spectators at the cornhole tournament. Rafe sneaks away from the judging tent after sampling 17 different pork shoulders, his fingers sticky with sauce, his boots caked in red clay, and drops into the only empty folding chair left at the edge of the grounds, right next to a woman he’s never seen before.
She’s wearing a faded 1977 Fleetwood Mac tour t-shirt and cutoff denim shorts, white canvas sneakers caked in even more clay than his boots, a single silver hoop earring glinting in her left ear, and there’s a dark smudge of barbecue sauce on the curve of her left cheek. She nods at his overflowing paper plate, says the shoulder from the guy with the neon pink food truck is miles better than the overcooked brisket everyone’s been raving about all afternoon, and her voice is low and a little rough, like she smokes the occasional menthol or sings too loud at stoplights.
She shifts to cross her legs, and her bare knee brushes the side of his worn work jeans, warm through the frayed fabric. He tenses immediately, ready to mumble an excuse and head back to his truck, but then she laughs at a kid who runs past with a cotton candy cone bigger than his head, and the sound cuts through the noise of the crowd like a knife. She says her name’s Clara, she took over the county library three months prior, moved from Chicago after her 22 year marriage ended, sick of paying $18 for oat milk lattes and walking past strangers who wouldn’t make eye contact if you were bleeding out on the sidewalk.
He tells her his name, what he does for work, and braces for the usual request: a discount on fixing a cousin’s pop-up camper, free labor hanging shelves at the library, a quote for a rental fleet flip for one of the local real estate groups. Instead, she leans in so close he can smell coconut sunscreen and the faint sweetness of peach iced tea on her breath, and says she found a 1972 Airstream Sovereign in the county’s archived property records the week before, parked on a half-acre plot the county owns half a mile from the Pisgah National Forest access road, left to rot for 12 years with no registered owner. She wants to fix it up into a free little library for hikers and campers passing through, stocked with used paperbacks, trail maps, and first aid kits.
Her elbow bumps his bicep when she gestures toward the tree line where the trailhead sits, and he doesn’t flinch. He finds himself rambling about the 1972 Sovereign he restored two years prior for a retired third grade teacher from Miami, how the aluminum shell polishes up brighter than any new luxury car, how the original solid oak cabinetry is always worth saving even if it’s spotted with water damage. He hasn’t talked this much to anyone who isn’t dropping off a parts order in six months, and he doesn’t hate the way it feels.
When she pulls a crumpled bluegrass festival flyer out of her shorts pocket, scribbles her cell number on the back in smudged dark blue ink, and shoves it into his palm, he’s half convinced he’s having a heat stroke. She says she already got the county commission to sign off on the project, has a small budget for materials, and she’ll bring a 12-pack of cold IPA and a peach pie she baked the night before if he’ll meet her at the lot the next morning at 10 a.m. to assess the damage. Her fingers brush his when she passes the flyer over, calloused at the tips like she gardens or plays guitar, and he holds onto the paper tight like it might blow away in the breeze if he loosens his grip.
He tells her 10 a.m. works, he’ll bring his tape measure and moisture meter, no charge for the initial walkthrough. She grins, and the corners of her eyes crinkle so deep he can see the faint silver lines fanning out from her temples. She stands up, brushes crumbs off her thighs, says if he bails she’ll track him down at his barn and leave piles of overdue western novels on his front porch every morning until he caves. She walks off toward the neon pink food truck, and he watches her go, the sun catching the strands of gray woven through the ends of her wavy brown hair.
He shoves the flyer into the front pocket of his work jeans, picks up his half-eaten plate of pork, and heads back toward the judging tent, already making a mental list of tools to bring with him the next day. When he climbs into his beat-up Ford F-150 after the cookoff ends, he pulls the crumpled flyer out of his pocket, taps the number into his phone, and saves it under “Clara Airstream” before he can talk himself out of it.
