Rafe Marquez is 61, has made his living restoring vintage campers for 17 years, still carries the faint, permanent smell of mineral spirits and cedar in the cuffs of his frayed flannel shirts. His only consistent flaw, if you ask the silver-haired ladies who linger by the bakery counter at the local grocery store, is that he’s refused every dinner invitation, set-up attempt, and neighborhood block party invite since his wife, Lena, passed eight years prior. He doesn’t mean to be rude. He just got used to quiet, to the slow, methodical work of patching dented aluminum and reupholstering dinette cushions alone, to camping three weekends a month in the 1972 Airstream he and Lena bought a year before she got sick, no small talk required.
He only shows up to the downtown food truck rally on that rainy Tuesday because the brisket truck from Austin is in town for one night only, and he’s been craving their dry-rub, jalapeño-stuffed tacos since last summer. The rain hits halfway through the line, cold and sharp, soaking through the brim of his worn Oregon State baseball cap by the time he gets his order. He turns to head back to his truck, trips over a rolling cooler someone left by the curb, and his taco goes flying into a puddle before he can even take a bite.
A hand wraps around his bicep before he can face-plant into the same puddle, firm, warm, the nail on the thumb polished a chipped terracotta. He rights himself, turns, and it’s Clara, his next door neighbor of three months, the one he’s only ever waved at from across the fence when he’s out walking his old hound dog Moe. She runs the used bookstore on Main Street, the one with the neon cat sign in the window he’s always found weirdly charming. She’s holding a cup of loaded elote and a sweating six pack of hazy IPA tucked under her other arm, her dark hair pulled back in a loose braid that’s got bits of rain stuck to the ends. “You looked like you were about to take a swim there,” she says, grinning, and her smile lines crinkle at the corners of her eyes so sharp it makes his chest feel tight, for half a second.
She yanks him under the pop-up awning strung with warm yellow string lights before he can protest, says she ordered too much elote anyway, offers to split it with him, plus one of the beers. He tries to say he can just go back to the line, but the line’s already 20 people deep again, the rain’s coming down harder, drumming so loud on the awning they have to lean in to hear each other over the mariachi band playing two stalls over. They stand shoulder to shoulder, his flannel brushing her waterproof raincoat every time one of them shifts to take a bite of the elote, the salt and lime and crumbly cotija cheese bursting on his tongue. When she passes him the paper cup, their fingers brush, and he feels the rough callus on her index finger, the kind you get from turning thousands of book pages over decades. He hasn’t touched anyone who wasn’t a client handing over a check in close to seven years, and the contact zings up his arm so fast he almost drops the cup.
He doesn’t know why he starts talking, first about the stupid lost taco, then about the 1968 Winnebago he’s currently restoring for a retired couple from Seattle, then about Lena, how they used to come to this exact rally every year before she got sick. He doesn’t talk about Lena to anyone, hasn’t in years, but Clara doesn’t push, just nods, asks small, specific questions that make it clear she’s actually listening, not just waiting for her turn to talk. She tells him she bought a beatup 1970 Scotty camper last month, has been trying to fix the water heater on her own for weeks, keeps ending up soaked and frustrated. When she laughs at her own mistake of trying to solder a pipe without turning the water off first, her shoulder presses fully into his, and he doesn’t move away.
The whole time, he’s fighting the voice in the back of his head that says he’s betraying Lena, that he should just say thank you and leave, that this is just another set-up the neighborhood ladies cooked up. But then she leans in, so close he can smell the coconut shampoo in her hair over the smell of smoked brisket and rain on hot asphalt, and brushes a fleck of cilantro off his chin with her thumb. The pad of her thumb brushes the gray stubble on his jaw, and for half a second he freezes, waiting for the sharp twist of guilt he’s come to expect any time he feels even a flicker of something for someone new. It doesn’t come. All he feels is warm, the same kind of warm he used to feel when Lena would lean over the console of their truck to brush crumbs off his shirt on road trips.
She admits she’s the one who’s been leaving peanut butter dog treats on his porch for Moe, saw how excited he got when a kid dropped one outside the bookstore a month back, figured he’d like them. Rafe’s been wondering who was leaving those treats for weeks, Moe goes crazy for them, sits by the door every morning waiting for one.
The rain lets up around 9, the sky turning that soft pale purple it gets after summer storms. They walk the three blocks back to their houses side by side, Moe waiting on Rafe’s front porch, tail thumping so hard the whole porch shakes when he sees them. He runs straight for Clara, skidding to a stop at her feet, and she kneels down to scratch behind his ears, laughing when he licks her cheek.
Rafe offers to come over tomorrow after he finishes sanding the cabinets on the Winnebago, bring the same IPA they were drinking, take a look at her Scotty’s water heater. She says she’ll have fresh chocolate chip cookies waiting, the kind with extra sea salt on top he mentioned he liked 20 minutes earlier. He nods, says he’ll see her then, turns to head up his porch steps.
He looks over his shoulder right before he opens his door, and she’s still standing on her porch, waving, the silver hoop earring she’s wearing catching the light from the streetlamp. He lifts his calloused hand to wave back, already turning the doorknob slow enough that he can watch her step inside her own house first, a half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth he hasn’t felt in eight years.
