Elias Voss, 53, makes his living restoring vintage neon signs out of a cinder block shop on Main Street in Lisbon, Ohio, a town where every third storefront has been empty since the steel mill closed in 2009. His biggest flaw, if you ask the few people he still talks to, is that he holds a grudge longer than he keeps a truck. He’s avoided the annual summer street fair for 12 straight years, ever since his wife left him for a real estate agent 10 years her junior who sold her on a “fresh start” in a suburb of Cleveland. This year, he couldn’t skip it. The town forced every local business to set up a booth, and the new mayor had already fined him twice for “blight” after he refused to take down his 1960s Hamm’s Beer neon that hangs over his shop door.
The sun sits low and golden over the fairgrounds by 6pm, turning the plastic cup of Bud Light in his hand condensation-slick, the grease under his fingernails dark against the pale skin of his forearms he never bothers to cover even on the hottest days. He’s half-asleep leaning against the folding table he set up, a handful of small restored neon pieces glowing softly behind him, when a shadow falls over his display.
She’s wearing a linen sundress the exact shade of baby blue that his 1978 F150 was when he bought it new, the fabric thin enough that he can tell she’s not wearing a bra, the hem brushing the top of her tanned, freckled calves. There’s a smudge of bright red cherry snow cone syrup on the edge of her jaw, and she smells like coconut sunscreen and peach hard seltzer when she leans in to get a better look at the tiny neon Budweiser sign he pulled out of a closed Cleveland dive bar last spring. She points at it, her nail polish chipped pale pink, and asks what he’s charging. He quotes the price, and she snorts, shaking her head, and says her husband would lose his mind if she brought that home. He’s on a kick to strip all the “tacky working-class nostalgia” out of the downtown to make it more appealing to out-of-state investors, she adds, and that’s when Elias’s jaw tightens. He knows exactly who she is now. Clara Hale, wife of the mayor who’s been making his life miserable for six months, who he screamed at during a city council meeting last month when the man tried to pass a curfew for all lighted business signs.
He’s half-ready to tell her to get lost when she leans closer, her elbow brushing the bare skin of his forearm, warm and soft, and says she saw that meeting. Clapped when he stormed out, actually. Thinks her husband’s a self-important prick who only ran for office so he could get his name on a plaque outside the new library, that he doesn’t care if half the local businesses fold as long as his property values go up. She’s leaning over the table now, her chest almost brushing the glowing neon, and when she tilts her head to laugh at the face he makes when she calls the mayor a “walking khaki pants ad,” he can see the faint silver scar along her left collarbone, the way her eyelashes are clumped a little from sweat.
The noise of the fair fades to a hum around them: kids screaming on the tilt-a-whirl, a cover band fumbling through a John Mellencamp deep cut, the pop of corn kernels from the kettle corn booth two down. She reaches out to tap the neon tube, her fingers brushing his when he moves to adjust the cord so it glows brighter, and her palm is softer than he expects, a tiny thin scar across her index finger she says she got falling off a horse when she was 12. He finds himself telling her about his ex-wife, about the Hamm’s sign he’s had since he was 19, about the way he stays up until 2am most nights soldering tubes because the hum of the neon is the only thing that doesn’t make him feel alone. She nods the whole time, doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t give him that pitying look everyone else does when he talks about the divorce. Says she and the mayor have slept in separate bedrooms for two years, that he spends more time with his campaign donors than he does with her, that she hasn’t laughed this hard in months.
By the time the fair starts shutting down at 8:30, the sky is dark purple at the edges, and neither of them has checked their phone once. He offers to show her the rest of his inventory back at the shop, the 10-foot neon diner sign he’s restoring for a place in Pittsburgh, the vintage motel signs he’s stacked against the back wall. She says yes before he finishes the sentence, agrees to meet him by the big oak at the end of Main Street in 30 minutes, once she drops her purse off at her car and tells her husband she’s going to a friend’s house for the night. She walks away, and looks over her shoulder twice, waving both times, the hem of her dress fluttering around her legs.
He spends the next 30 minutes packing up his booth in a daze, dropping a screwdriver twice, ignoring the guy from the hardware store who stops to ask him about the Hamm’s sign. He’s leaning against his truck by the oak at 9 on the dot, a cold beer in one hand, when he sees her walking toward him. She’s changed into faded black jeans and a ratty Tom Petty shirt, no wedding ring on her left hand, and she’s holding a crumpled paper bag of fried Oreos she swiped from the food booth before the workers packed up. He unlocks the shop door, and the low, warm hum of a dozen half-restored neon signs hits them the second they step inside, glowing pink and blue and green against the cinder block walls. She reaches for his hand before he can flip the overhead light on, her fingers lacing through his, calloused from horseback riding and gardening, and he doesn’t pull away.
