Arthur Voss, 62, has made a fine art of keeping to himself. The vintage camper refurbisher spends 10 hours a day in his cinder block workshop outside Black Mountain, North Carolina, sanding aluminum paneling, reupholstering dinette cushions, and only speaking to parts delivery drivers and the occasional veteran picking up a free refurbished Airstream. Since his wife Carol died of ovarian cancer eight years prior, he’d written off any sort of casual connection, convinced letting anyone new in would be a betrayal of the 32 years they’d spent together. The only annual social event he bothers with is the local fire department’s chili cookoff, a tradition Carol started volunteering for in 1992, and he only stays long enough to eat one bowl of the fire chief’s famous brisket chili and drink a single cold beer.
He’s leaning against a splintered pine picnic table, boots still caked with sawdust from the 1972 Argosy he’d been stripping that morning, when he spots her across the canvas tent. Lila Marquez, 38, the new county health inspector who’d written him up a month prior for selling unlabeled wild honey at the downtown farmers market. He’d ranted for two hours to his next door neighbor about power-tripping bureaucrats after that ticket, had half a mind to mail her a jar of the same honey with a note saying it hadn’t killed anyone yet.
She sees him before he can slip around the side of the tent, and she’s walking over before he can think of an excuse to leave. She’s wearing well-worn work boots, a Carhartt hoodie with a flannel tied around her waist, dark curly hair pulled back in a braid strung with tiny silver beads. She leans in close enough that he can smell cedar soap and cinnamon gum over the thick aroma of chili, charcoal, and cheap beer hanging in the tent. “I owe you an apology,” she says, and he blinks, caught off guard. “I didn’t realize you were the guy refurbishing campers for disabled vets. My little brother did three tours in Afghanistan, got one of your builds last year. It changed his life.”
She reaches past him for a stack of paper napkins on the table behind him, and her forearm brushes his, the rough fabric of her hoodie catching on the frayed cuff of his jacket. His skin prickles, a sharp, foreign warmth he hasn’t felt since Carol was alive. He doesn’t pull away. He listens while she explains she’s been looking for someone to fix up her grandma’s 1968 Scotty camper for six months, every refurbisher within 100 miles is booked six months out, and she’d trade three months of free health consulting for his small business and a case of his favorite dark roast if he’d fit her in.
He’s halfway to saying no before he meets her eyes. She’s holding his gaze, no hesitation, no awkwardness, and he notices the tiny silver hoop in her left nostril, the faint smudge of chili powder on the edge of her jaw. The voice in his head is screaming that this is wrong, she’s half his age, people will talk, Carol would be furious, but then she laughs, a low, warm sound, and the voice quiets. “I know you lost your wife,” she says, soft enough no one else can hear. “My mom told me. She said you haven’t let anyone in since. That’s a long time to be lonely, Art.”
She reaches up, brushes a fleck of chili off his cheek with her thumb, her fingers calloused from framing out the addition on her own house, warm from holding her paper bowl of chili. He doesn’t flinch. He tells her to bring the Scotty by his workshop next Saturday, nine a.m. sharp, and to bring those cinnamon rolls her grandma used to make, no raisins. She grins, nods, scribbles her phone number on a napkin and shoves it in the pocket of his jacket before she turns to walk back to the fire chief’s table, waving over her shoulder.
He pulls the napkin out of his pocket, stares at the messy scrawl of her number, the little drawing of a camper next to it. The bluegrass band playing at the edge of the tent launches into a song Carol used to sing in the car on road trips. He lifts his beer to his mouth, and for the first time in almost a decade, he doesn’t feel guilty for smiling.
