Elio Rizzo, 53, restores vintage travel trailers out of his Flagstaff workshop, a job he fell into eight years prior after his ex-wife traded their 1978 Scotty Sportsman and 12 years of marriage for a guy with a luxury Class A RV and a Cabo vacation home. His worst flaw is that he’s dug into his loneliness like it’s concrete, turning down every dinner invite, every in-person client meetup, every chance to be around people who might ask about the faint tan line where his wedding ring used to sit. The only reason he’s at this small mountain town fall craft fair is his 22-year-old niece, who runs the vintage market section, begged him with a $1,500 bonus to display his fully restored 1962 Airstream Bambi.
The first three hours are unremarkable. He smells fried funnel cake and pine, nods at passersby, answers the same four questions about the Bambi’s plumbing and custom cabinetry on loop. Then the woman running the adjacent pressed wildflower booth leans over the waist-high wooden counter separating their spaces, and his throat goes tight. He recognizes her immediately: Maeve, his ex-wife’s youngest cousin, the kid who used to trail him at family barbecues begging for bike tire repair lessons, who he hasn’t seen since a year before his divorce. She’s 32 now, dark hair streaked copper, freckles still dusting her nose, wearing a worn plaid flannel and jeans caked with mud from earlier flower-hiking trips. She leans in farther to squint at a photo of the Bambi’s interior taped to the counter, and her sleeve brushes his bare forearm, warm and soft. She smells like pine resin and honey lip balm.
“You still hold a drill like you’re ready to fight a lumberjack,” she says, grinning, her voice lower than he remembers, rough around the edges from years of singing in local dive bar bands. His first instinct is to bolt, to pack up the Bambi and drive back to his empty workshop and pretend he never saw her. Messing around with his ex’s cousin is the exact kind of drama he’s spent almost a decade running from, the kind that sparks unhinged family group chat rants and awkward confrontations he has zero interest in navigating. But he can’t look away, from the way her eyes crinkle when she laughs at his dumb dad joke about trailer axles, the way she tucks hair behind her ear when she listens to him talk about the Bambi’s original aluminum trim. When she hands him a jar of homemade peach jam as a “welcome to the block” gift, their fingers brush for half a second, he fumbles the jar a little, heat crawling up his neck. She doesn’t tease him, just slides a paper towel across the counter for him to wipe sticky jam off his coveralls.
By mid-afternoon, the sky goes dark as ink, and fair organizers announce an early shutdown ahead of a mountain thunderstorm. Everyone scrambles to pack up, wind whipping flyers off his counter, the first fat raindrops pinging sharp against the Bambi’s aluminum roof. Maeve’s pop-up tent collapses ten minutes later, metal poles bending under the wind, her crates of pressed flower art starting to soak through. He doesn’t think before moving, grabbing the two closest crates and nodding toward the Bambi’s door. “C’mon. Wait it out in there.”
They squeeze inside, the Bambi’s built-in bench only big enough for two if they sit shoulder to shoulder, knees almost touching. The rain picks up fast, drumming so loud against the exterior that the rest of the fair’s noise fades to a dull hum. They sit silent for a minute, listening, before Maeve leans her head back against the wall and looks at him, eyes dark in the dim light from the fogged window. “I always thought my cousin was an idiot for leaving you,” she says, quiet enough he almost misses it over the rain. “You were the only adult at those parties who talked to me like I wasn’t just a kid. I had the biggest crush on you back then. Thought you were the coolest guy alive.”
He freezes for half a second, every instinct screaming this is a bad idea, that crossing this line will blow up the quiet, safe, boring life he’s built. But then she leans in, slow, giving him time to pull away, and he doesn’t. Her lips are soft, taste like the peach hard candy she was sucking on earlier, and when he cups the side of her face, her skin is warm under his palm. It’s not rushed, not messy, the kind of kiss that feels like it’s been building for 12 years, like both of them were just waiting for the rain to give them an excuse.
The rain stops 40 minutes later, sun breaking through clouds, painting the sky pink and orange over the pines. They climb out of the Bambi, clothes a little wrinkled, faces warm, and pack up the rest of their booths. When she’s done loading crates into her beat-up pickup, she tugs a pressed desert marigold print out of a box, scribbles her cell number on the back in blue Sharpie, and tucks it into the front pocket of his coveralls. She says she’s in town for another week, wants to see the half-restored trailers in his workshop, has been looking for someone to teach her to fix the leaky roof on her own tiny 1970s camper.
He stands by the Bambi, watching her drive away, her arm hanging out the window waving, until her pickup turns the corner out of the fairground lot. He pulls the marigold print out of his pocket, runs his thumb over the crinkly pressed flower, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel the urge to run from something that doesn’t fit his neat, planned routine. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, types a text to her before he can overthink it, and hits send.
