Manny Ruiz is 62, a retired high school auto shop teacher who runs a tiny classic car restoration side gig out of his two-car garage in Akron, Ohio. Since his wife Elaina passed eight years ago, he’s avoided anything that even smells like romance, turning down setups from his sister, skipping the weekly bar meetups his former co-workers badger him about, even going as far as to pretend he’s not home when the single widow from down the street brings him chocolate chip cookies. He knows he’s being stubborn, that Elaina would roll her eyes and call him an idiot for wasting his golden years holed up with old engine blocks and NASCAR reruns, but old habits stick harder than gasket sealer.
He’s set up a folding table at the annual west side street fair on a sticky August Saturday, selling custom engraved license plate frames he cuts and stamps in his garage after dinner. The air smells like fried dough, charcoal from the food truck grills, and the faint chlorine from the public pool two blocks over, and he’s just finished selling a frame that says “MY OTHER CAR IS A LAWNMOWER” to a kid in a baseball cap when Lena Marlow walks up. She’s 57, the ex-wife of the former gym teacher he worked with for 18 years, the guy who left her for a 28-year-old yoga instructor three years prior, and Manny has only ever exchanged polite nods with her at holiday staff parties and district meetings before.
She leans across the table, and the late afternoon sun catches the thick silver streak running through her dark wavy hair, and Manny can smell lavender hand lotion mixed with the peach lemonade she’s holding in a plastic cup. She says she just finished restoring a beat-up 1972 Ford Maverick she bought at a police auction, and she wants a frame that says “MAVERICK NOT A MILQUETOAST” for the back. When Manny hands her a sample of the metal stock to feel, their fingers brush, and neither pulls away for a beat longer than necessary. Her nails are chipped with engine grease, he notices, not polished, and that tiny detail makes his chest feel tight in a way it hasn’t since Elaina was alive.
His first thought is that he shouldn’t be paying this much attention. Half the neighborhood is at the fair, someone he knows will see them talking, they’ll spread rumors, he’s supposed to be the grieving widower who doesn’t look at other women. He feels a hot flash of shame, half disgust at himself for even noticing how her jeans fit, how her laugh sounds when he tells her the story about the kid who tried to install neon underglow on a school bus as his senior project. But she doesn’t leave. She leans against the table leg next to his chair, her knee brushing his every time a group of kids runs past, and she talks about the trouble she’s had with the Maverick’s transmission, about how she’s watched him work in his garage when she walks her golden retriever past his house at sunset, about how she’s the one who’s been leaving jars of homemade salsa on his back porch all summer, not the old lady next door like he’d assumed.
He’s so wrapped up in talking to her that he doesn’t notice the fair vendors are packing up around them until the fried dough truck pulls out, leaving a trail of greasy exhaust in its wake. The sun has dipped below the tree line, the string lights strung across the street are flickering on, and she pushes off the table, tilting her head at him, and asks if he wants to come back to her place to take a look at the transmission. She teases that she’ll pay him in salsa and the cold six pack of root beer she has in her fridge, the kind he used to drink every lunch break in the teacher lounge, the kind he’d forgotten anyone remembered he liked.
He almost says no out of instinct, the same automatic refusal he’s given every invitation for the last eight years. Then he looks at her, at the smudge of dirt on her cheek, the way she’s biting her lip like she’s nervous he’ll turn her down, and he nods. He packs up his table while she carries her leftover potted geraniums to her beat-up pickup truck, and when he sets the last crate of his frames in the bed of his own truck, she steps close enough that he can feel the heat off her arm through his flannel shirt, and squeezes his wrist gently. She says she’s glad he’s not as much of a hermit as everyone says he is. He pops the cap off a root beer he keeps in his cooler for hot days, hands it to her, and climbs into his truck to follow her down the street, the hum of his engine mixing with the sound of crickets chirping in the tree lawns.
