Elio Ruiz, 51, makes his living patching dents in vintage travel trailers and rewiring their rusted fuse boxes, a job that lets him work alone 90% of the time, which is exactly how he’s liked it for the 8 years since his wife left him for a 28-year-old solar panel salesman. His biggest flaw is that he’s spent those 8 years clinging to a stupid, self-imposed rulebook: no dating anyone who lives within 20 miles, no accepting dinner invitations from friends, no doing anything that might make it feel like he’s “moving on” from the life he thought he was supposed to have. He only agreed to drop off the handcrafted oak countertop he’d restored for the local rotary club’s harvest fair silent auction because he owed the club president a favor, and he planned to be in and out in 10 minutes max, beer from the food truck in hand, before anyone could corner him into small talk.
He’s halfway to the exit when he rounds the hay bale display and slams shoulder-first into someone holding a plastic cup of spiced apple cider. The liquid sloshes over the rim, splatters dark on the sleeve of his grease-stained flannel, and when he looks down to apologize, he meets Mara Alvarez’s eyes. She’s his ex-wife’s first cousin, 48, a pottery instructor who lives two hours away, and he hasn’t seen her since his divorce was finalized. She doesn’t step back immediately, her chest still pressed light to his bicep, her boots planted half an inch from his, and he can smell jasmine perfume mixed with cinnamon from the cider on her breath. She dabs at the wet spot on his sleeve with a crumpled napkin from her pocket, and her knuckle brushes the back of his wrist, the callus on her index finger from years of throwing clay rough against his skin, a detail he remembers from family Thanksgivings a decade prior, when he’d watched her shape mugs at the dining room table when no one else was paying attention.
He opens his mouth to make an excuse to leave, to say he’s got a trailer waiting on a new axle back at the shop, but she smirks, tilts her head, and asks if he’ll walk her to the pie contest booth so she can cast her vote for the peach crumble she brought that morning. The sensible part of his brain screams no, that this is a line he can’t cross, that everyone in this town knows everyone’s business, that word will get back to his ex before the fair even closes, that he’ll be the subject of PTA gossip for six months straight. But he nods anyway, falls into step beside her, and when a group of kids dart past them chasing a goat that escaped the petting zoo, she grabs his forearm to steady herself, her fingers wrapping warm around his muscle, and he doesn’t shake her off.
They meander past the fried dough stand, the bluegrass band playing a slow cover of a Johnny Cash song, the Amish vendor selling jars of pickled okra that she stops to buy three of, teasing him that she remembers he used to sneak them out of her grandma’s pantry when he thought no one was looking. He teases her back about the streak of silver in her dark hair at the temple, and she doesn’t get flustered, just says she earned every gray hair dealing with her ex-husband’s midlife crisis motorcycle phase. They sit on a stack of hay bales off the main path to split a warm scone, and every time someone walks past and jostles the bales, their knees brush, denim on denim, and he doesn’t shift his leg away. He can hear her breath catch a little when their shoulders press together, and he looks over to find her already looking at him, no trace of the polite cousin smile she used to wear at family events, just something softer, sharper, unapologetic.
She mentions she heard through the family grapevine that he’s been restoring a 1958 Scotty Sportsman, the exact model she’s been wanting to buy for years to take on cross-country pottery pop-up tours, and asks if she can come see it at his shop tomorrow. For a second, he’s frozen, the taste of cinnamon scone still in his mouth, warring with the part of him that’s spent 8 years telling himself this kind of thing is wrong, that wanting something this easy, this fun, this forbidden is a betrayal of the life he lost. But the other part of him, the part that’s been eating frozen dinners alone in his shop every night, the part that’s tired of being lonely, wins out. He says yes, no hesitation, no qualifiers, no excuses.
She scribbles her phone number on a napkin from the pie booth, stained pink at the corner from cherry filling, and tucks it into the pocket of his flannel, her fingers brushing the front of his chest slow, deliberate, before she pulls away. She says she’ll text him when she’s on the road tomorrow, and turns to walk back to her car, glancing over her shoulder once to wave before she disappears into the crowd. He stands there for a minute, his fingers pressed to the napkin in his pocket, still feeling the warmth of her hand on his chest, the scratch of her callus against his wrist, the sound of her laugh when he told her he still had the mug she made him for his 40th birthday on his workbench. He turns away from the exit, walks towards his truck, and turns the key in the ignition, heading for his shop instead of his empty, quiet house, because he wants to wipe down the Scotty’s dash and sweep up the sawdust from the floor before she gets there.
