Javier Mendez is 52, a vintage camper van restorer who runs his shop out of a weathered red barn 10 minutes outside of Brevard, North Carolina, and he’d rather sand rust off a 1968 Airstream shell for 12 hours straight than show his face at any of the town’s endless “community bonding” events. It’s a flaw he’s owned since his wife Ellen passed four years prior; small talk feels like sandpaper on his skin, and the way neighbors corner him to ask how he’s “holding up” makes him antsy to leave before the conversation even starts. He only agreed to stop by the town’s summer craft beer festival that Saturday because a regular client owed him $800 for a custom cedar cooler he’d built for the event’s beer tent, and the guy had texted him three times begging him to drop it off in person so he could pay cash, no Venmo hassle. Javier showed up in his usual uniform: faded Hank Williams Jr tee, work boots caked in pine sap, jeans with a frayed tear at the right knee, his hands still smudged with faint grease under the nails even after he’d scrubbed them with dish soap for 10 minutes before leaving the shop.
He’d planned to grab the cash and bolt before anyone could flag him down for a chat, but the second he handed off the cooler and stuffed the folded bills into his front pocket, the sky opened up. Fat, warm summer rain poured down so hard he could barely see 10 feet in front of him, and the only empty awning within sprinting distance was strung over the public library’s summer reading sign-up booth. He ducked under it without thinking, shaking rain off his ball cap, and looked up to see Mara Alvarez, the town’s new 48-year-old head librarian, leaning against the folding table behind him, half her shoulder already damp from the wind spraying rain under the awning edge. He froze. Two months prior, he’d run into her at the Food Lion at 9 p.m., picking up frozen dinners and beer, and she’d been wearing a cutoff flannel shirt with no bra underneath, her hair loose instead of pulled into the tight bun she wore to all town meetings. He’d stared before he could stop himself, had hurried out of the store without even grabbing his receipt, and had avoided every place he might run into her ever since, convinced he’d come off like a total creep.
She didn’t seem upset to see him, though. She pushed a cold peach hard seltzer across the table toward him, her mouth twitching up in a half-smile. “Figured you’d rather have this than a summer reading bookmark for the 10th graders,” she said. Her wire-rimmed glasses were speckled with rain, a few loose strands of dark hair stuck to the sweat on her neck, and the top two buttons of her linen button-down were undone, just enough that he could see the faint edge of a silver sunflower necklace at her collarbone. He hesitated for a second before grabbing the seltzer, their fingers brushing when he wrapped his hand around the cold can. He felt the faint callus on her index finger, the kind you get from turning thousands of book pages over decades, and she glanced down at the thin, pale scar across his left knuckle, the one he got when a rusted Westfalia panel slipped and cut him last winter. The wind picked up again, and they both had to step closer to the table to stay out of the rain, her shoulder pressing firm against his bicep. He could smell lavender shampoo mixed with the faint citrus of her seltzer, and she could smell sawdust and the orange hand cleaner he used in the shop, sharp and familiar.
They talked for 40 minutes while the rain poured, no small talk about how he was holding up, no questions about why he never came to town events. He told her about the half-restored 1972 Westfalia sitting in the back of his barn, the one Ellen had begged him to fix up for a cross-country trip before she got sick, the one he’d barely touched in three years because it felt like too much. She told him she’d been renting dented, beat-up campers by herself for weekend trips to the mountains for two years, ever since she got divorced and moved to Brevard from Miami, that she’d always wanted to drive up to Glacier National Park but didn’t want to make the drive alone. She admitted she’d seen him staring at her at the Food Lion that night, that she’d laughed about it later, that she’d been asking the guy who ran the feed store about him for months, trying to work up the nerve to stop by his shop. Javier’s face went hot for a second, the guilt he’d carried for two months melting fast into something lighter, something he hadn’t felt since Ellen died: giddy, stupid excitement, the kind that makes you feel 17 again, not 52 with a bad knee and grease under your nails.
By the time the rain stopped, the sun was dipping low over the Blue Ridge Mountains, painting the sky pink and orange. He walked her to her beat-up Subaru Outback parked at the edge of the festival lot, carrying her stack of summer reading flyers for her. She stopped at the driver’s door, set the flyers on the roof, and leaned up, first kissing him soft on the cheek, then pressing her mouth to his, slow, no rush, no pressure. He could taste peach seltzer on her lips, felt her hand rest light on his chest over his tee, right over his heart, beating faster than it had in years. She pulled away after a minute, opened the car door, and tossed the flyers onto the passenger seat. “Text me when you finish that Westfalia,” she said, grinning, before she got in and drove off.
Javier stood there for a minute, holding the half-empty bag of boiled peanuts she’d shoved into his hand before they left the booth, and looked down at his smudged, grease-stained fingers, the ones he’d always thought were too rough, too marked up, for anyone to want to hold. He stuffed the bag into his jacket pocket, walked back to his work truck, and turned the key in the ignition, already mentally mapping out the parts he needed to order for the Westfalia first thing Monday morning.
