Elias Voss, 52, vintage camping gear restorer, hates block parties. He only showed up because Marnie, his 72-year-old next door neighbor, begged him for three weeks to bring the fully restored 1964 Coleman cooler he’d buffed, re-sealed, and repainted with the classic forest green logo as the top raffle prize for the town’s annual summer fundraiser. He’s leaning against a folding table stacked with craft beer cans, work boots caked in pine sap from the canvas tent frame he’d repaired that morning, already mentally tallying the list of fixes he could knock out if he left right now. The air smells like grilled brats and citronella, kids scream on the bounce house 20 feet away, and he’s just about to ditch the cooler with Marnie and bolt when someone brushes past him.
Her linen skirt swipes the top of his scuffed work boot, her elbow knocking lightly into his ribs as she stretches to grab a black cherry seltzer from the ice bucket at his elbow. She apologizes immediately, turning to face him, and he’s hit first with the smell of lavender hand cream and the faint, sweet tang of old paper, like the stacks of used books he’d haul home from garage sales as a kid. She’s got silver threading through the dark brown hair she’s pulled back in a loose braid, freckles across her nose, and her eyes are the color of the glacial lakes he used to camp at as a teen with his dad. She notices the cooler slung over his arm, the fresh, unchipped paint, the calluses on his knuckles from sanding canvas and tapping out dented aluminum cookware, and asks if he’s the guy who fixes old camp gear people dig out of their grandparents’ attics.
Elias almost lies, says he’s just dropping off the prize, but then she smirks and says she’s heard his workshop is stuffed full of old sleeping bags and cast-iron camp stoves that he refuses to sell to people who only want to use them as Instagram props for their overpriced downtown apartments. He huffs a laugh, surprised—he’s been careful to keep his work low key, only takes jobs from people who actually plan to use the gear, not display it on floating shelves. She introduces herself as Clara, the new part-time librarian who moved to town three months prior after her husband passed away from a sudden heart attack. She mentions she’s got a dented 1972 aluminum camp cot in her attic, the first thing her late husband ever bought her when they started dating, the front leg is bent, no one’s been able to fix it without ruining the original brushed finish, and she’s been too nervous to ask around for help. Elias’s first instinct is to say no—he never takes on jobs for new people without a reference, never invites strangers back to his workshop, which he’s kept as a private, ex-wife-free zone for the eight years since his spouse left him for a Portland tech bro who drove a Tesla and thought camping was “a poor person’s vacation.” But then she tilts her head, and her thumb brushes the back of his hand when she passes him a free raffle ticket she’d pulled from her jeans pocket, and he finds himself saying he can take a look at it that night, if she’s got time to walk back to his place with him after the raffle drawing.
The walk takes ten minutes, the sun dipping below the fir tree line, fireflies flickering in the tall grass next to the dirt road that leads to his workshop. She points out a great blue heron taking off from the creek that cuts through his property, her hand wrapping around his bicep to get his attention, her palm warm through the thin flannel shirt he’d thrown on after work. He stops walking, turns to face her, and she doesn’t pull her hand away. He can hear the faint twang of the block party’s country cover band in the distance, crickets chirping in the underbrush, and when he leans in to kiss her, she doesn’t pull back. It’s slow, no rush, tastes like cherry seltzer and the salt from the soft pretzel he’d eaten an hour earlier, and when they pull apart, she’s smiling, the corner of her mouth tugged up like she’d been waiting for him to make that move for an hour.
They spend an hour in his workshop, him bending the cot leg back into place with a rubber mallet so he doesn’t scratch the finish, her sitting on his workbench flipping through his tattered 1960s camping gear catalogs, pointing out the same brass lantern her dad used to take on fishing trips to the coast. When he’s done, he loads the cot into the back of her beat up forest green Subaru, and she leans in to kiss him again before she gets in the driver’s seat, tells him she’s got a stack of old Louis L’Amour western novels he’d probably love, she’ll drop them off tomorrow and bring the homemade peach pie she baked that morning. He stands in the driveway until her taillights disappear around the bend, the cold night air nipping at his cheeks, and realizes he’d completely forgotten about the repair list he’d been mentally tallying earlier. He reaches into his jeans pocket, pulls out the crumpled raffle ticket she’d given him, and tucks it into the metal frame of the half-restored 1968 canvas tent propped next to his front door.
