Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living patching rust and reupholstering cracked vinyl in vintage campers out of a cinder block shop on the edge of Burns, Oregon. He’s lived there three years, since his ex-wife took half his retirement and moved to Florida with a golf pro, and he’s avoided every town community event in that span on principle. The only reason he showed up to the fire department’s end-of-summer cookout was his 19-year-old apprentice, Javi, begged him— the crew had cut their shop a 40% discount on a new fire suppression system two months prior, and Javi said skipping would be a slap in the face.
He leans against a splintered pine picnic table, warm cheap beer in one hand, the other crusted with leftover aluminum polish he didn’t scrub off before he left, and watches a group of volunteer firefighters toss cornhole bags and yell over each other. The air smells like charred hamburgers, pine, and the faint sweet tang of someone’s homemade peach cobbler cooling on the dessert table. He’s halfway to convincing himself he can slip out before anyone notices him, when he catches her staring.
She’s the new county librarian, Lila, moved to town two months prior, and he’s heard every local busybody within a 10-mile radius gush about how “nice but far too fancy” she is for their scruffy high-desert town. She’s wearing a plaid flannel rolled up to her elbows, faded jeans, and scuffed work boots, not the cardigans and cat-eye glasses everyone seemed to expect her to wear, and she’s holding a paper plate with a piece of that peach cobbler, leaning against the dessert table and looking right at him. When she catches him looking back, she doesn’t look away. She smirks, nods at the beer in his hand, and walks over.
She stops half a foot away, close enough he can smell lavender hand lotion and lemon Pledge on her shirt, and holds out her free hand. “You’re Manny, right? The camper guy.” Her fingers are cold from holding her plate, and when they brush his, he feels the hard callus on her index finger, worn thin from decades of turning book pages. He nods, shakes her hand, and tries not to sound gruffer than he means to when he confirms that’s him.
She pulls up a photo on her phone of a beat-up 1972 Boler, dented along the passenger side, roof covered in moss, and holds it out to him, leaning in so their shoulders brush when she points at the rust along the wheel well. “I picked this up off a guy in Boise last week for 800 bucks. Everyone says you’re the only person within 100 miles who won’t charge me double what it’s worth to fix it.” The edge of her flannel rides up her wrist when she gestures, and he sees a tiny silver tattoo of a book on the inside of her forearm, ink faded at the edges. He finds himself talking for 45 minutes straight, explaining how to patch the rust, how to re-seal the roof, how the old Boler floors rot faster if you leave them exposed to the eastern Oregon rain, and she listens the whole time, leaning in when he gets into the weeds about epoxy mixes, holding eye contact a full beat longer than polite, laughing loud when he makes a joke about the town’s only coffee shop serving dishwater they call lattes.
He’s fighting it the whole time, the hot twist in his chest he hasn’t felt since his ex left, half disgusted with himself for even noticing how the orange dusk light gilds the edges of her hair, how she tucks a strand behind her ear when she’s thinking, how she doesn’t flinch when she accidentally brushes the crusted aluminum polish on his knuckles. Everyone says she’s too straight-laced, too soft for the rough, isolated life out here, and he’s too old, too gruff, too set in his ways to be wasting time chasing someone who’s probably going to leave for a bigger city in a year.
The first firework goes off overhead then, bright red, bursting so loud it makes the picnic tables rattle, and the crowd surges a little around them, pushing her straight into his chest. Her hand lands on his forearm to steady herself, and she doesn’t move it when she looks up at him, her cheeks painted pink and blue from the fireworks going off behind her. “I don’t just want a quote, Manny,” she says, loud enough he can hear her over the crowd’s oohs, her thumb brushing the hair on his forearm light as a feather. “I want you to teach me how to do the work myself. On weekends. If you’ve got time.”
He hesitates for half a second, the voice in his head screaming that he’s going to get burned again, that this is a stupid idea, and then he nods. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got time.”
They exchange numbers before she leaves, her handwriting loopy and sharp on the back of an old library checkout slip she pulls out of her pocket, and he stands there long after her beat-up Subaru turns the corner out of the parking lot, finishing his warm beer, the checkout slip crumpled in his pocket next to his shop keys. He gets in his own beat-up Ford F-150, turns the key in the ignition, and a 1992 George Strait song he used to dance to with his ex at their wedding comes on the radio. He doesn’t change the station.
