Manny Ruiz, 57, has restored 117 vintage camper vans in the 19 years he’s run his shop outside Bend, Oregon, and he’s got one non-negotiable rule: no messing around with clients. He picked it up 12 years back, after a three-month fling with a woman who brought her 1968 Airstream in for a full reno went south, and she sued him for $12,000 in made-up damages just to get back at him for not wanting to move to Florida with her. He paid the settlement, tightened up his contracts, and never let a customer cross the line from professional to personal again.
He’s at the downtown farmers market on a sticky late August Saturday, gripping a cold hazy IPA that’s dripping condensation down his wrist, when he spots her. He’d know Clara Hale even if he hadn’t spent the last two weeks under the dash of her 1972 VW Westfalia, the one she’d dropped off two weeks after she moved back to town, widowed, following her ex-husband Jake’s heart attack down in Arizona. Jake was his high school football teammate, the guy who’d helped him push his first broken-down van home when they were 17, and Manny had almost turned down the job when he saw her name on the intake form. Small town gossip travels fast, and he didn’t need anyone thinking he was making a move on his dead friend’s ex, even if they’d been divorced for seven years before Jake died.
She waves when she sees him, tucking a strand of sun-bleached blonde hair behind her ear, and walks over, a paper bag of peaches slung over one arm, a half-eaten peach in her other hand, juice glistening on her lower lip. She stands close enough that he can smell lavender shampoo and ripe peach and the faint, sweet tang of the rosé she’s sipping from a plastic cup, no awkward six-foot gap like most people kept in the years right after the pandemic. When she leans in to yell over the noise of the bluegrass band playing near the food trucks, asking how the van’s coming along, her elbow brushes his bicep, light and accidental, and he feels his neck heat up like he’s 17 again, talking to a cheerleader after a game.
He tells her he replaced the carburetor, fixed the leak in the pop-top seal, just needs to reupholster the bench seats and she’ll be good to go. She grins, and when she laughs at his story about Jake accidentally driving the same Westfalia into a ditch after the 1988 homecoming game, she reaches out and touches his forearm for half a second, like she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it, before yanking her hand back like she touched a hot stove. She doesn’t step away, though. Her eyes stay locked on his, a little wider than before, and he can see the flush high on her cheekbones, not just from the sun.
The voice in the back of his head is screaming that this is a terrible idea. She’s a client. She’s Jake’s ex. Half the people at this market know both of them, and if anyone sees them standing this close, laughing like they’re sharing a secret, the gossip will be all over town by sunset. But he can’t stop staring at the smudge of peach juice on her chin, the way her sundress straps are slipping a little off her shoulder, the way she’s biting her lower lip like she’s trying to work up the nerve to say something.
She asks him if he wants to come over to her rental cottage that night. She found a stack of old maintenance logs for the van in Jake’s old storage bin, she says, and she doesn’t understand half the scribbled notes in the margins. She’s got ribeyes marinating in the fridge, she says, and a bottle of bourbon Jake stashed away for hunting trips that’s been gathering dust since he moved back. He hesitates for three full beats, his rule blaring in his head like a fire alarm, before he nods.
The sun is just dipping below the pine trees when he pulls up to her cottage, a tiny blue place on the edge of town with a porch swing and a garden of wildflowers out front. She’s sitting on the steps, barefoot, wearing cutoff jeans and a faded Oregon State sweatshirt, when he gets out of his truck. They eat steak off paper plates on the porch, drink bourbon out of mismatched mugs, and flip through the stack of crinkled log books, laughing at the dumb notes Jake scrawled in the margins: “Blown tire on way to Bend, Manny owes me a beer for making me change it in the rain,” “Clara threw my favorite hat out the window after I forgot our anniversary, don’t let her drive.”
When she laughs at the hat note, she leans into him, her shoulder pressed firm to his, and he can feel the heat of her through the sweatshirt. He brushes a strand of hair off her face, his thumb brushing her cheekbone, and she doesn’t pull away. She tilts her chin up, and he kisses her slow, no rush, tasting bourbon and peach and the mint gum she’d been chewing, and for the first time in 12 years, he doesn’t care about the rules, or the gossip, or the stupid lawsuit that made him build all those walls in the first place.
He wakes up the next morning to sunlight streaming through the cottage windows, her head on his chest, her fingers tracing the thin scar on his forearm he got when he dropped a transmission block on himself eight years prior. He tells her he can have the van finished by the end of the week, a full three days earlier than he’d promised. She hums, says she was thinking she didn’t really want to drive up to Alaska to scatter Jake’s ashes alone, like she’d originally planned. He grins, tells her he’s got a two-week block of free time starting next week, if she’s okay with a co-pilot who knows how to fix a broken alternator in the middle of nowhere and makes damn good camp coffee. She nods, kisses him again, slow and soft, her hand fisting in the front of his t-shirt. He reaches for his phone on the nightstand to move his other client appointments back, already making a mental list of extra spare parts to throw in the back of the Westfalia before they leave.
