Manny Ruiz, 51, makes his living sanding dents out of 1960s travel trailers and reupholstering their cracked vinyl cushions, and he hasn’t so much as flirted with anyone in the eight years since his wife left him for a golf pro she met at a couples’ retreat. He’s got a scar across his left knuckle from a slip with a power sander last winter, and a bad habit of turning down every invite to town events just to avoid running into his ex or any of her extended family. He only agreed to set up a display of his latest Airstream restoration at the annual Maple Falls chili cookoff because the organizer owed him three free cases of his favorite cheap light beer, no questions asked.
The air smells like smoked brisket, cinnamon, and burnt marshmallows from the fire pit at the edge of the park, and the ground crunches under his steel-toe work boots with every step he takes to grab another cup of chili. He’s leaning against the chrome bumper of the Airstream half an hour later, picking a piece of jalapeño out of his teeth, when he spots her. Lila Marquez, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, 47, who sells hand-tooled leather goods out of a converted van up in Portland, is walking toward him, flannel tied around her waist, faded Johnny Cash tee sticking to her shoulders from the unseasonably warm October sun, mud caked on the toes of her work boots.
He tenses up immediately, already planning an excuse to leave, but she’s grinning before she’s even ten feet away, and he can’t move. She stops close enough that he can smell lavender perfume mixed with campfire smoke on her shirt, and she holds eye contact for two full beats longer than polite, like she knows exactly how flustered he is. “Still drinking that watered-down piss beer, huh?” she says, nodding at the plastic cup in his hand, and he snorts before he can stop himself. When she reaches past him to grab a stack of napkins off the Airstream’s fold-out side table, her hip brushes his, and her forearm grazes his scarred knuckle. His whole arm tingles for thirty seconds after she pulls back.
They chat for 45 minutes, leaning against the bumper, watching groups of kids run past chasing each other with glow sticks as the sun dips lower. She tells him she’s in town for the weekend, and her cousin—his ex—is down in Arizona at a golf tournament with her husband, so no one they know who’d run their mouth is around. Manny’s chest feels tight, half from the thrill of the secret of it, half from the quiet voice in his head screaming that this is a terrible idea, that everyone in this town gossips like their lives depend on it, that he’ll end up heartbroken again. She brushes a fallen maple leaf off his flannel sleeve when she laughs at a joke he makes about a client who tried to make him install a hot tub in a 13-foot Scamp trailer, and her fingers linger on his bicep for three slow seconds. He notices the tiny silver trailer-hitch ring on her index finger, and she says she bought it after seeing his restoration work pop up on her Instagram feed six months prior, that she’s been following his projects ever since.
By 8 p.m., most of the crowd has cleared out, the fire pit is down to embers, and the only sounds left are the hum of portable generators and the distant croak of frogs down by the creek. Lila nods at the Airstream’s door. “You gonna show me the inside, or you gonna make me stand out here all night?” she says, and Manny hesitates for half a second before he unlocks the door and holds it open for her. The inside is warm, the small electric space heater humming in the corner, the reupholstered brown leather cushions soft under his jeans when he sits down on the banquette after her. She closes the door behind her, the lock clicking soft enough only they can hear it. She leans back against the counter, looking up at him, and says she’s been thinking about talking to him since she saw him at the grocery store three months prior, that he looked so tired carrying a case of beer and a bag of frozen burritos by himself that she almost walked over to say hi then, but she didn’t want to scare him off.
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, just steps closer, until the toes of his boots are touching hers, and lifts a hand to brush a strand of dark hair off her face. Her skin is warm under his palm, and she leans into the touch, her eyes fluttering shut for half a second. They talk for another hour, slow, quiet, then kiss slow, no rush, the sound of the last of the cookoff attendees driving away fading into the dark outside. When she steps back out into the cool night two hours later, her flannel is buttoned wrong, and Manny’s hair is sticking up in the back. She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, then pulls a small hand-tooled leather keychain out of her jacket pocket, stamped with his business logo, and presses it into his palm. “No pressure. No drama. I’m here till Sunday,” she says, before she turns and walks to her beat-up pickup truck.
Manny stands there by the Airstream bumper, twisting the keychain between his fingers, watching her taillights fade down the dirt road out of the park. He takes a sip of his now-warm beer, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel like running away.
