Royce Pritchard is 59, makes his living restoring vintage camping gear out of a cinder block garage behind his house in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and has not attended the town’s weekly summer street dance in 12 years. His late wife, Lori, begged him to come every year until she died of ovarian cancer six years ago, and he’d always brushed her off, claiming the crowds gave him a headache, the beer was overpriced, the band only played the same 10 country covers on loop. He showed up this time only because his sister had threatened to drop off her 14-year-old foster son’s entire collection of broken dirt bikes on his lawn if he didn’t help corral the kid at the event. The kid had bailed 10 minutes after they arrived to ride ATVs with friends up in the national forest, leaving Royce leaned against the chipped red brick wall of the old general store, sweating through his faded Carhartt shirt, holding a lukewarm Pabst, and wondering if he could sneak out before his sister noticed he was still alone.
He spotted her across the crowd first. Elara Mendez, 41, ex-wife of his former business partner Jake, the man he’d split ways with eight years prior after a fight over a bad batch of canvas that cost them $12,000 in lost orders and a 10-year friendship. He’d not spoken to either of them since the fight, had assumed she hated his guts for calling Jake a liar and walking away from the company they’d built together. She was wearing cutoff denim shorts, scuffed white work boots, a flannel tied around her waist, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid streaked with a single streak of silver at the temple, same as it had been when they’d all gone camping together up at Cade’s Cove back in 2017. She caught him staring, held eye contact for three full beats, lifted her lime seltzer can in a mock toast, then started walking toward him.
She stopped so close he could smell coconut sunscreen and pine on her clothes, the faint fizz of her seltzer mixing with the smell of fried oreos from the food truck down the block. “Figured I’d find you hiding over here,” she said, leaning around him to tap the brick wall next to his shoulder, her bare arm brushing his bicep for half a second, the contact sending a jolt up his spine he tried to ignore. “You still hate crowds that bad?” He grunted, took a sip of his beer, told himself he should make an excuse to leave, that talking to his ex-partner’s ex-wife was a line he shouldn’t cross, that Lori would’ve teased him for even considering it, but he couldn’t make himself move. She laughed at his noncommittal answer, and her hand landed on his arm, stayed there long enough for him to feel the calluses on her palm from her job as a forest ranger, the rough edge of a scar across her knuckle from a chainsaw accident two years prior he’d heard about through the town gossip mill.
They talked for 40 minutes, leaning against that wall, the noise of the crowd fading into background static. She told him she’d found the old Coleman lantern he’d given her and Jake as a wedding gift when she was cleaning out their cabin during the divorce, that she’d tried to drop it off at his shop last week but he’d been out on a hike, that she’d fixed the fuel line herself using the YouTube tutorial he’d posted back in 2020. He told her he’d been meaning to reach out to Jake for years to apologize, that he’d spent half a decade convinced he’d been the one in the wrong, that he’d messed up the canvas order out of laziness. She shook her head, leaned in even closer, so her shoulder was pressed fully against his, and told him she’d found the receipts when she was going through Jake’s old files, that he’d been the one who swapped the heavy-duty canvas for cheap bulk fabric to save a few bucks, that he’d lied to Royce the entire time.
The band switched to a slow, twangy cover of a Patsy Cline song, couples moving into the center of the closed-off street to sway together. She tilted her head up at him, her dark eyes glinting under the string lights strung across the road, and held out her hand, the faint indent of her old wedding band visible on her index finger. “C’mon. You owe me a dance. Lori always said you had two left feet, I wanna see if she was right.” He hesitated, his chest tight, thinking about how wrong this felt, how he was supposed to still be grieving, supposed to still hate anyone tied to Jake, but he put his beer down on the wall next to him and took her hand. Her palm was warm, calloused, smaller than his, and when she pulled him into the crowd she didn’t let go, lacing their fingers together like they’d done it a hundred times before.
He stepped on her foot twice in the first two minutes, and she laughed so hard she leaned her head on his shoulder, her breath warm against his neck, the soft ends of her braid brushing his jaw. He put his other hand on her waist, felt the faint dip of her hip under the thin fabric of her t-shirt, and for a second he forgot everyone else was there, forgot about the fight with Jake, forgot about the guilt he’d carried for years for skipping all those dances with Lori. When the song ended, she didn’t pull away right away, just looked up at him, her cheeks flushed, and said she’d been wanting to ask him out for coffee for three months, but she’d been scared he still hated Jake enough to turn her down.
He told her he’d love to. They walked back to his beat up 1998 Ford F-150 parked a block over, the street lights casting gold over the sidewalk, crickets chirping from the overgrown empty lot next to the road, the sound of the band fading behind them. She stopped at the passenger door, reached up to brush a stray pine needle off the collar of his shirt, her fingers grazing his jaw for half a second, the contact sending that same jolt up his spine again. He unlocked the door for her, she climbed in, and pulled a crumpled flyer for the regional vintage camping swap meet next month out of her shorts pocket, waving it at him. “I already booked a booth. You can bring all the restored lanterns and coolers you’ve got stacked in your garage. We can split the profits.” He grinned, turned the key in the ignition, the truck rumbling to life under them, and pulled out onto the empty main road, the windows rolled down, the cool mountain air carrying the faint smell of clover and distant fiddle music through the cab.
