Rafe Marquez, 57, spends most days up to his elbows in fiberglass resin and rusted camper hinges, running a one-man vintage travel trailer restoration shop out of a weathered red barn 12 miles outside Asheville, North Carolina. He’s stubborn to a fault, has refused every invitation to local town events for 8 straight years, ever since his ex-wife walked out with a suit-wearing realtor and called his life’s work “a waste of perfectly good garage space.” His 24-year-old apprentice, Javi, practically begged him to come to the town’s annual fall beer and brisket festival, swearing the smoked brisket from the food truck out of Marshall was worth putting up with a few hours of small talk with neighbors he’d avoided for years. Rafe caved mostly because Javi had worked three straight 12-hour days to finish a 1968 Airstream restoration for a client in Florida, no complaints, no overtime ask.
The air smells like hickory smoke and fermented apple cider, bluegrass twanging from a small stage set up near the town square, when someone slams into his left side hard enough to slosh half his hazy IPA down the front of his plaid flannel. He’s halfway through a gruff curse when he looks down, and sees a woman’s hand wrapped loosely around his forearm, warm through the thin fabric, her nails painted the deep terracotta of the dirt roads near his shop. She’s laughing, soft and throaty, freckles scattered across her nose, a streak of silver cutting through the auburn hair tucked behind one ear, and he recognizes her immediately: Lila, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one he’d only seen a handful of times at family cookouts back when he was married, the one who’d always laughed at his dumb jokes about carburetors even when everyone else rolled their eyes. She’s 49, he realizes, and she’s even prettier than he remembers.
He tenses up before he can stop himself, old guilt flaring sharp in his chest—he’d spent 20 years feeling stupidly, pointlessly guilty for noticing her, for looking forward to the rare family events she’d show up to, even though he’d never said a single out-of-line word to her, never even touched her before today. She doesn’t let go of his arm right away, leans in so their shoulders brush when she yells over the music, apologizing for not looking where she was going, saying she’s been in town three months running a small herbal apothecary downtown, had asked around about him a few times but heard he “doesn’t do people.” He snorts, surprised, and the tension in his shoulders eases a little when she grins up at him, holding his eye contact steady, no awkwardness, no mention of his ex.
They end up perched on a scratchy hay bale off to the side of the crowd, splitting a plate of brisket fries, talking for so long he forgets Javi even exists, forgets he was supposed to leave an hour ago to get back to a frame repair he’s halfway done with. She tells him she picked up a beat-up 1972 Volkswagen Westfalia for $1200 a month back, can’t find anyone who knows enough about old VWs to get it running right, and he’s already mentally inventorying the parts he has stacked in the back of his barn before she finishes asking if he’d be willing to look at it. The guilt nags at him every few minutes—his ex would throw a fit if she knew they were talking, would call it a betrayal, would make both their lives hell for months—but it’s hard to care when she leans in to ask him a question about engine parts, her shoulder pressed to his, the scent of pine resin and vanilla lip balm wrapping around him, and when she brushes a crumb of brisket off his chin, her thumb lingering on his jaw for half a second, he doesn’t pull away.
She writes her number on a crumpled napkin, draws a wobbly little cartoon of a Westfalia next to it, and tucks it into the pocket of his flannel before she says she has to go, pressing a quick, warm kiss to his cheek that leaves his skin tingling for five minutes after she’s gone. He finds Javi by the food truck, grinning like he knows exactly what just happened, and brushes off his questions with a half-assed growl that doesn’t land at all. He cranks the heater in his beat-up Ford F-150 when he gets in, pulls the napkin out of his pocket to make sure he didn’t lose it, and merges onto the two-lane highway leading back to his barn, no heavy dread weighing in his chest for the first time in nearly a decade.
