Manny Ruiz, 52, makes his living patching cracked neon tubes and rewiring 60-year-old transformers for dive bars and retro diners across southern Arizona. He’s stubborn to a fault, still does all the heavy lifting himself even when his arthritic knuckles throb for three days after hauling an 8-foot sign up a flight of stairs, and he’s avoided any kind of casual romance since his ex-wife left eight years prior, complaining he cared more about dead glass than living people. He only showed up to the Sip N’ Cruise soft opening because the owner promised him free beer for life if the custom Mustang neon he’d spent three weeks restoring lit up without a hitch.
It did, obviously. The electric blue and hot pink tubes hummed loud enough to feel in his teeth from the bar stool he’d claimed on the patio, the glow gilding the edges of the saguaros lining the parking lot. He nursed a frosty Modelo, picking salt off the rim of the bowl of dry roasted peanuts set between him and the next empty seat, rubbing the half-healed cut on his left index finger where a shard of red neon had sliced him open mid-solder two days prior. He planned to finish the beer, nod at the owner, and head home to his shop to mess with the broken 1960s motel sign he’d dragged out of a junkyard the week before.
That plan went out the window when Elara slid into the seat next to him. She was the owner’s sister-in-law, 48, a high school biology teacher who’d just gotten back from a three-day field trip to the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and she wore a faded denim jacket over a sage green tank top, a thin pale scar slicing across her right eyebrow from a hiking fall the year before. She leaned in to yell over the Johnny Cash playing on the speakers, close enough he could smell cedar shampoo and the faint, sweet tang of prickly pear margarita on her breath, and told him the neon was the coolest thing she’d seen all month.
He grunted at first, defaulting to the standoffishness he used to scare off people who asked too many personal questions. But she didn’t leave. She grabbed a peanut from the bowl between them, and their knuckles brushed when she reached, her skin rough and calloused, same as his, the pad of her middle finger ridged with a hard bump from holding grading pens six hours a day. She sat six inches away from him, closer than any stranger had gotten in years, her knee brushing the frayed hem of his work jeans under the bar every time she shifted, and she held eye contact three beats longer than polite, like she actually wanted to hear what he had to say.
He found himself rambling before he could stop himself: how he’d tracked down the exact 1957 transformer for the Mustang sign from a collector in Albuquerque, how the pink glow came from pure neon gas and the blue from argon dosed with a tiny amount of mercury, how he’d soldered 14 separate cracked tubes to get the whole thing to light evenly. She didn’t zone out, didn’t check her phone, just leaned in further, her shoulder brushing his when a group of drunk college kids yelled as the jukebox switched to a Toby Keith track. He teased her about the chipped purple nail polish on her thumbs, and she laughed, loud and warm, and said it was from marking cactus spines for her students to study earlier that day.
The part of him that had spent eight years convincing himself he was better off alone screamed at him to leave, that he was going to mess this up, that he was crossing a line flirting with the owner’s sister-in-law, that he was too old, too gruff, too wrapped up in his dumb glass signs to be worth anyone’s time. But when she held out her phone to show him photos of a neon cactus sign she’d picked up at a garage sale six months prior, one she couldn’t get to light for her classroom, their wrists touched, and he felt a jolt hot enough to match the hum of the neon behind him, a thrill he’d forgotten existed.
He hesitated for ten full seconds, then told her he could take a look at the sign, if she wanted to bring it by his shop the next day. He never let strangers come to his shop, never let anyone see the stacks of half-finished projects, the piles of old sign parts he couldn’t bear to throw away, the dented couch he napped on when he pulled all-nighters to hit a deadline. But she smiled, the corner of her mouth tucking up on one side, and she grabbed a napkin from the dispenser next to the peanuts, scribbled her number on it in blue ballpoint, and pressed it into his palm, her fingers lingering for two full beats longer than necessary. She told him she’d bring the good cold brew from the roaster down the street from his shop, that she’d driven past a hundred times and always wondered who was behind the garage door plastered with old metal sign letters.
They stayed for another hour, talking about the way monsoon humidity made his arthritis act up, about the rubber snake her students had left in her desk drawer the week before as a prank, about the best spot in the desert to hunt for vintage motel signs that had been left to rot. When she left to meet her sister at the front door, she hugged him, her chest pressing soft against his for a split second, and she kissed his cheek, close enough to the corner of his mouth he could taste lime on her lips when she pulled away.
He drove home with the napkin crumpled in the pocket of his work jeans, the pink and blue glow of the Mustang sign fading in his rearview mirror. He didn’t head straight to his workbench like he usually did when he got home. He dragged a stack of old sign tubes off the extra chair next to his work table, wiped the dust off the surface with an old rag, and made sure the coffee maker was plugged in and ready to go before he went to bed.
