Manny Rocha, 53, makes his living stripping rust off 1960s travel trailers and fitting them with reclaimed oak countertops and solar panels that fit flush to the curved aluminum roofs. He’s lived outside Asheville for eight years, ever since his ex-wife loaded her jewelry box and her half of the furniture into a U-Haul and drove to Portland with the client she’d been cheating on him with for six months. His worst flaw is he doesn’t trust nice. If someone smiles at him for too long, he assumes they need a free plumbing fix or a discount on a trailer hitch. He only showed up to the county fall chili cookoff because his shop assistant threatened to hide all his 10mm sockets if he spent another Saturday holed up in the barn sanding rust off a 1965 Aristocrat.
He’s leaning against a splintered pine picnic table at the edge of the crowd, picking at a bowl of beef chili so spicy his eyes are watering, loaded with burnt ends and pickled jalapeños, when he smells cinnamon and lemon pine-sol before he sees her. Lena Marquez runs the vintage home goods stall on Main Street, the one with the stacks of chipped enamelware and midcentury cabinet pulls he stops by every other week for parts. He’s avoided her for three months, ever since he’d spent 45 minutes in her shop talking about his mom’s old 1958 Shasta trailer and left with his face hot, stupidly flustered, because he’d noticed the wide silver band on her left ring finger. He’d kicked himself for two days after that, disgusted he’d let himself flirt with a married woman, so every time she’d waved from her stall when he drove past, he’d just nodded stiffly and sped up, pretending he didn’t see her.
She stops right in front of him, holding a paper plate of cornbread slathered with honey butter, and the side of her worn denim jacket brushes his flannel-covered bicep because the crowd of people pushing past to get to the prize table is so tight. “I knew I’d find you hiding over here,” she says, and her voice is warm, like she’s teasing him but not in a mean way. Her dark hair is pulled back in a thick braid, and there’s a streak of silver at her temple that he’d never noticed before, right above the small scar on her eyebrow from when she fell off a horse as a kid, a story she’d told him that first day they met. He freezes, his plastic spoon halfway to his mouth, and mumbles a hello, already mentally calculating how fast he can make an excuse to leave before he makes an ass of himself again.
When he fumbles a napkin off the stack next to him and reaches to pass it to her, she reaches for it at the exact same time, and their fingers brush. The shock of it runs up his arm like static from a worn trailer cord, and he almost drops his whole bowl of chili in the red clay dirt. She laughs, a low, throaty sound, and tucks a strand of hair that escaped her braid behind her ear. “You’ve been real weird around me lately,” she says, tilting her head like she’s trying to figure him out, and he can feel his neck turning bright red under the scruff of his beard. He doesn’t want to lie, but he doesn’t want to admit he’d been lusting after a woman he thought was off limits either, so he just shrugs, staring at the chili stains on his scuffed work boots.
Finally, he just blurts it out, no filter, the way he talks when he’s frustrated with a rusted bolt that won’t budge. “I thought you were married. The ring.” He nods at her left hand, and she blinks, then looks down at the silver band and laughs so hard she snorts a little, drawing a quick glance from a couple walking past. She holds her hand up so he can see the engraving on the inside, the cursive letters faint from 60 years of wear. “It’s my grandma’s. She left it to me when she died. I haven’t been married since my husband passed six years ago, lung cancer.” She pauses, grinning, and nudges his boot with hers, the toe of her work boot scuffed the same way his are. “I thought *you* hated me. I found that 1962 Airstream taillight you’ve been looking for, texted you three times, never heard back.”
The relief hits him so hard he has to lean against the picnic table for a second. All that time he’d been fighting the urge to call her, hating himself for wanting someone he thought was taken, and it was all a stupid misunderstanding. The country band on the small stage switches to a slow, twangy Johnny Cash cover, and a group of kids run past, screaming, chasing a golden retriever with a whole cob of corn in its mouth. The air is crisp, 62 degrees, red and orange maple leaves swirling around their ankles, and it smells like wood smoke and chili and Lena’s cinnamon perfume, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel the urge to run, to make an excuse, to shut down before he can get hurt.
“Wanna ditch this?” he says, nodding toward the dirt parking lot where his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150 is parked, the bed loaded with scrap aluminum he picked up earlier that week. “I got that Airstream I’m restoring for the guy from Charlotte in the shop. We can crack open a six pack of that IPA you said you liked last time we talked, I’ll show you the taillight spot, you can tell me if I picked the right terracotta tile for the kitchen backsplash.” He’s half convinced she’ll say no, that she’s got plans, that he’s misreading the whole thing, but she grins, wipes a crumb of cornbread off her lip, and tucks her hand into the crook of his elbow when they start walking through the crowd. Her hand is warm through the thin flannel of his shirt, and he can feel the pressure of her fingers against his arm, like she’s making sure he doesn’t disappear on her again.
He fumbles in his jeans pocket for his truck keys when they get to the lot, and she brushes a stray chili pepper seed off his jaw with her thumb, her touch soft, almost hesitant, like she’s not sure he’ll let her. He unlocks the passenger side door for her before he even remembers he never lets anyone sit up front, not even his shop assistant, who’s worked for him for three years.
