Rafe Mendez, 52, spends 90 percent of his waking hours covered in sawdust and old lead paint stripper, restoring vintage travel caravans for rich folks who pay top dollar to glamp in Hill Country state parks. He’s got a rule against leaving his 10-acre property after 7pm unless it’s an emergency, but the 1962 Scotty Sportsman he spent 11 months sanding, rewiring, and reupholstering in gingham vinyl took third place in the county fair’s vintage camper show, so he made an exception. The fair grounds reek of fried dough, livestock, and cheap beer, the string lights strung between the food stalls glow golden in the dusk, and his work boots crunch on discarded cotton candy sticks and hay as he lines up for the peach cobbler stand he’s been going to since he was 16.
The woman behind the counter wipes her hands on her flour-stained denim apron and looks up, and he recognizes her before she says his name. Elara Reyes, four years younger than him, the little sister of his old go-kart racing partner Javi, who moved to Alaska 20 years back and only texts him once a year on his birthday. She’s got the same crooked smile Javi had, a streak of silver in her dark curly hair that she keeps pushing out of her face, and her forearms are freckled and smudged with peach syrup. She teases him about still driving that beat up 1998 Ford F-150 he had in high school, he teases her about still burning the edges of the cobbler crust the way she did when she used to sneak them samples behind Javi’s back when they were teens.
When she hands him his cobbler in a styrofoam container, their fingers brush. Her hand is warm, her nail polish chipped pale peach, sticky from sorting peaches all afternoon. He freezes for half a second, doesn’t pull away fast, and she huffs a small laugh that doesn’t sound like she’s making fun of him. He doesn’t head back to the camper show like he planned. He pulls a rickety metal stool up to the counter of the stand, eats his cobbler while she rings up the last of the evening crowd, and when a group of rowdy teens leaves a stack of empty soda cans on the counter, he grabs them and tosses them in the trash behind the stand without asking.
She complains that her 17-year-old son bailed on her shift that morning to drive to San Antonio for a punk show, that her feet have been killing her since 9am, that the price of fresh peaches went up 30 percent this year because of the drought. He listens, doesn’t interrupt, which is more than he does for most people who talk to him these days. When she says she needs to drag a crate of peaches from the back storage shed to restock the last hour of the shift, he stands up and offers to help before he thinks about it. They lift the crate together, his left arm pressing against her chest for a split second when they adjust their grip, and they both go quiet for a beat after they set the crate down, neither of them mentioning the contact. He can smell cinnamon and peach and the faint, clean scent of her lavender laundry detergent under the sweat and fair grime, nothing like the heavy, expensive perfume his ex-wife used to douse herself in before parties.
He’s torn the whole next hour, half of him screaming that he should go home, feed his hound dog Mabel, stick to the routine he’s built since his ex left him 8 years prior, when he chose to finish a rush restoration job over their 10th anniversary trip to Big Bend. The other half of him can’t stop looking at the way her shirt slips off one shoulder when she reaches for a container of vanilla ice cream, the way she bites her lower lip when she’s adding up change, the way she keeps leaning across the counter to talk to him like he’s the only person there even when there’s a line of people waiting. He hasn’t felt this off-kilter since the day his ex drove away with the moving truck, and he hates it and loves it at the same time.
The fair shuts down at 10pm, the rides cut their power, the crowd thins out to a handful of stragglers carrying stuffed animals and leftover funnel cakes. He helps her stack the coolers in the back of her minivan, locks the storage shed for her, and when she leans against the door of her van and asks if he wants to come back to her place to try the fresh peach pie she baked that morning, that her son’s gone till tomorrow so the house is quiet, he hesitates for three full seconds. He thinks about Mabel, who’s fine alone for a few extra hours, about the caravan he’s supposed to start sanding at 7am, about the rule he made 8 years ago to never let anyone get close enough to be disappointed by him again. Then she tucks a strand of curly hair behind her ear, her thumb brushing her lower lip for half a second, and he says yes.
They drive separately to her small bungalow on the edge of town, the porch strung with the same kind of golden string lights as the fair, a tabby cat curled on the porch rail. She cuts two slices of pie, pours them each a glass of sweet tea, and they sit on her porch swing, the crickets chirping so loud they almost drown out the distant hum of traffic from the highway. When she passes him his plate, he lets his hand rest on top of hers for three full seconds, and she doesn’t pull away. When she leans in to kiss him, the faint tang of cinnamon on her tongue tastes like every good thing he didn’t think he was allowed to want anymore.
