Rico Marquez, 53, has run his vintage motorcycle restoration shop out of a cinder block garage in East Austin for 17 years. His biggest flaw is holding grudges longer than he holds onto the original paint jobs on the 1970s Hondas he restores for twice his usual rate. For 12 years, he’s avoided every extended family gathering his ex-wife invites him to, all because her cousin Manny scammed him out of a $1200 lot of rare Harley Sportster parts back in 2011. He’s got a daughter in her final year of art school in Chicago, hasn’t dated anyone longer than three months since his divorce finalized eight years prior, and spends most of his weekends volunteering at the local youth bike co-op when he’s not hunched over an engine block.
He’s manning a tiny booth at the neighborhood summer street fair the first Saturday of August, selling hand-stamped metal keychains to raise money for the co-op, when the shadow falls over his display. The mariachi band two blocks over is mid-ranchera, the air smells like roasted pecans and fried Oreos, and sweat is sticking the hem of his faded shop tee to his lower back. He looks up, and the woman leaning into the booth has copper streaks in her dark wavy hair, sun freckles across her nose, and a smudge of cadmium blue paint on her left jawline. She’s wearing cutoff denim shorts and a faded Willie Nelson tee, her bare arm brushing the edge of the folding table as she reaches for a keychain stamped with a tiny sunflower at the exact same second he does.
Their knuckles bump. He feels the thin, hard callus on her index finger, the kind you get from holding a paintbrush for hours a day, and she huffs a laugh, holding eye contact longer than a stranger would. “Rico, right? Manny’s cousin’s ex-husband?”
He pulls his hand back like he’s been burned, already bracing for the argument he’s been prepping for over a decade. “If you’re here to defend that thief, you can save your breath.”
She snorts, leaning further into the booth, her knee brushing his where he’s standing behind the table. He can smell coconut sunscreen on her skin, undercut with the sharp, sweet scent of the peach popsicle she’s holding in her other hand. “Elara. Manny’s little sister. I moved back to Austin last month to teach high school art. And for the record, I think my brother’s a grade A dumbass. I found out he scammed you last year, pulled the cash out of my savings to pay you back, have been looking for you ever since.” She pulls a crumpled white envelope out of her crossbody bag, slides it across the table, and her thumb brushes the back of his hand when he reaches for it.
He stares at the envelope, then at her, the old anger warring with the sharp, unexpected jolt of attraction he’s felt since he first looked up. He spent 12 years writing off everyone in Manny’s side of the family as untrustworthy, and now she’s standing here, teasing him, paying back money she didn’t even owe, and he can’t remember the last time someone looked at him like she does, like she’s amused by his grumpy act and not annoyed by it.
He counts the cash later, when she hangs around the booth for another hour, chatting with him about the bikes he’s restored, the kids at the co-op, her students who keep drawing custom motorcycle decals for their notebooks. Every time she leans in to ask a question, her shoulder brushes his, and he has to fight the urge to tuck a strand of hair that keeps falling in her face behind her ear. When a group of kids crowd the booth to buy keychains, she steps behind the table to help him ring them up, her hip pressed to his the whole time, warm and solid through their thin tees.
He closes up the booth an hour early, once the sun starts to dip below the oak trees lining the street, and he asks her if she wants to get a beer at the dive bar down the block before she heads home. She grins, says she thought he’d never ask, and they walk side by side, their hands brushing every few steps, neither of them pulling away.
They sit in a booth in the back of the bar, the jukebox playing old Johnny Cash, and she slides into the same side of the booth as him 20 minutes in, so their legs are pressed together from hip to ankle under the table. She tells him she had a crush on him when she was 19, saw him working on a beat up Harley at a family barbecue, thought he was the coolest guy she’d ever met, but he was married and 10 years older and she never said a word. He laughs, admits he remembered her from that barbecue, thought she was way too young and way too off limits to even look at twice.
They stay until last call, the bartender wiping down the counter around them, and he walks her to her vintage Vespa parked out front. She leans against the seat, pulls him close by the front of his tee, and kisses him slow, the taste of lime lager and peach popsicle on her lips, her fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck. He rests one hand on her hip, the other on the seat of the Vespa next to her thigh, and he can feel the low hum of the idling engine through the metal under his palm.
When she pulls back, she’s grinning, her cheeks pink. He pulls the sunflower keychain out of his pocket, the one they both reached for earlier, and tucks it into the pocket of her leather jacket. She tells him to come over to her place tomorrow morning, she needs help adjusting her Vespa’s carburetor, and she’s got a fridge full of cold beer and a stack of old motorcycle magazines he can flip through while he works. He nods, and she kicks the stand up, pulls her helmet on, and waves as she pulls out onto the street, taillights fading into the dusk. He stands there for another minute, the envelope of cash still in his work pants pocket, the faint taste of her lip gloss still on his mouth, and he flicks the crumpled photo of Manny he’s kept taped inside his wallet for 12 years into the trash can next to the streetlight.
