Moe Rothenberg, 59, vintage trailer restorer, has run his shop out of a weathered red barn 12 miles outside Spokane for 18 years. Since his wife left him for a solar panel sales rep seven years prior, he’s kept human interaction limited to drop-offs, pickups, and the weekly Tuesday trivia night at The Rusty Sprocket, the dive bar on Monroe Street. He doesn’t do small talk, doesn’t date, still has a screenshot of a two-year-old one-star Yelp review of his shop saved to his phone, the one that called him “unreliable, unprofessional, and rude to boot” from a user named lpage824. He’d ranted about it to every customer that month, convinced it was some stuck up out-of-stater with more money than sense who’d flaked on a deposit then threw a fit.
The bar is crowded that Tuesday, the first cool night of October, the air thick with the smell of fried cheese curds and Pabst draft, Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” humming low from the jukebox in the corner. Moe’s claimed his usual booth by the door, a pitcher of beer on the sticky laminate table, when a woman slides into the seat across from him before he can protest. All the other tables are full, she says, half shouting over a group of construction guys yelling about a college football score, and she doesn’t want to stand through the whole night. She’s wearing a faded green flannel, cuffed jeans, work boots caked in mud, her dark hair streaked with gray pulled back in a loose braid. She has a smudge of blue ink on her left cheek, chipped sage green nail polish, and when she reaches across the table to grab a napkin, her elbow brushes his, warm through the worn denim of his work shirt.
He’s about to tell her to find somewhere else to sit when the trivia host calls for team sign ups, and she leans in, grinning, her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners. “I’m Lila. I crush 70s TV and pre-2000 country music trivia. We’d win if we teamed up.” Moe freezes. Lila Page. lpage824. The woman who wrote the Yelp review. His jaw tightens, but he nods anyway, too stubborn to back down from a chance to win the $50 bar tab. For the first 20 minutes, he’s cold, short with her, until she snorts at his snarky answer to a question about 1968 Airstream model specs, and says “Wait, you know that because you’re Moe, right? The trailer guy. I wrote that Yelp review two years ago. I’ve been meaning to find you to apologize.”
She explains the mix-up before he can snap. She’d dropped off a deposit check for her late dad’s 1968 Bambi, tucked it under his shop door when he wasn’t there, never heard back, assumed he’d bailed on the job. Three months later, she found the check tucked under the floor mat of her old pickup, had slipped out of the envelope when she’d carried it to the barn. By then she’d already left the review, was too embarrassed to reach out, had been coming to trivia for three weeks trying to work up the nerve to talk to him. When she reaches across the table for a french fry at the same time he does, their knuckles brush, and Moe notices the calluses on her fingertips, the tiny paper cuts along her thumb, and she says she restores old rare books for the downtown library, has for 17 years. Their knees brush under the table, and neither of them moves away.
They win the trivia contest by six points, Lila nailing the final question about Johnny Cash’s 1968 Folsom Prison setlist, and Moe can’t stop grinning, even when he remembers he was supposed to be mad at her. The rain is coming down soft when they step outside, the sidewalk glistening under the streetlights, the smell of pine and wet asphalt hanging in the air. Moe offers to walk her to her beat up old International Scout parked at the far end of the lot, and she stops under the bar’s awning, turning to face him, her hand resting light on his forearm. She’s a full head shorter than him, and when she tilts her chin up to look at him, he can smell lavender lotion mixed with rain on her flannel, can see the faint freckles across her nose he didn’t notice inside. He kisses her before he can overthink it, slow and soft, her hand moving from his arm to his chest, her fingers curling into the fabric of his jacket, and he can feel her heartbeat through the material, fast and steady, same as his.
They make plans for him to come out to her place at 9 the next morning to look at the Bambi, and she laughs when he admits he’s had her Yelp review saved to his phone for two years, teasing him for holding a grudge longer than his ex-wife held on to their marriage vows. She drives off, waving out the window of the Scout, and Moe stands in the rain for a full minute, the cold seeping through the collar of his jacket, before he pulls his phone out, finds the screenshot, and hits delete.
