Leo Rios is 62, makes his living restoring antique maps out of the cluttered garage of his 1920s bungalow in west Asheville, wears a worn leather tool belt around his waist even when he’s not working, full of tiny tweezers and glue sticks for map repairs, and has not attended a single neighborhood event since his wife Elara died of ovarian cancer eight years prior. The only reason he showed up to this year’s summer block party was the 16-year-old kid who mows his lawn promised free smoked brisket and no one would bother him if he parked himself under the big oak at the edge of the property. He’s halfway through his second cheap lager, picking a stray piece of brisket fat off his flannel shirt, when he hears a sharp yelp to his left.
She stumbles over a half-inflated water balloon left by a group of screaming first graders, one hand flying out to grip his forearm to keep from face-planting into the mulch. Her palm is warm, calloused at the heel, like she spends a lot of time holding a tennis racket or a hammer, and the scent of lavender body wash and cut grass wraps around him before she even straightens up. She’s 54, he knows, Mara Carter, the new elementary school principal who moved into the blue bungalow three doors down three months prior, and the entire neighborhood has been whispering about her nonstop since the moving truck pulled up. He’s heard the stories: left her husband of 25 years for a 28-year-old art teacher, got dumped six months later, moved across the state to escape the fallout. The wives on the street call her a bad influence, the dads glance at her a little too long when they think no one is looking.
She apologizes, holding his gaze for a beat longer than strictly polite, no trace of embarrassment on her face. She says she knows who he is, brought a tattered 1930s map of the Appalachian Trail to his old storefront on Haywood Road seven years back, he fixed the tear along the Tennessee border for half price because he said most people don’t care enough about old trails to pay full freight. He remembers her, now, the way she’d leaned over the counter then, same freckles across her nose, same smudge of ink on her left wrist, like she’s always scribbling something she doesn’t want to forget. He nods, takes a sip of beer, glances past her at the group of neighbors clustered on the nearby porch, staring.
She follows his line of sight, snorts, and leans her hip against the tree next to him, close enough that their shoulders brush when she shifts her weight. She teases him, says if he’s scared to be seen talking to the neighborhood pariah he can say she cornered him, no hard feelings. He huffs a laugh, says he hasn’t cared what anyone else thought since 2017, when a wealthy tech bro tried to stiff him on a 3 month restoration job for a 1792 frontier map of western North Carolina, so he hung the map above his fireplace and told the guy to sue him, never heard a word back. She laughs loud at that, head tilted back, and when she settles she touches his elbow, light, like she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.
They talk for 45 minutes, the hum of the party fading into background noise. She tells him about the kid in her second grade class who brings her a smooth river rock every morning, about how she found a box of old surveyor’s logs at a garage sale last weekend, about how the neighborhood book club refused to let her join last month. He tells her about the map he’s currently working on, a 1842 stagecoach route map that has a hidden note scrawled in the margin by a woman running away from her husband in Georgia, about how he still leaves a cup of Elara’s favorite peppermint tea on the counter every morning out of habit, about how he hasn’t let anyone inside his garage workshop in three years. He doesn’t mean to say that last part, it slips out before he can catch it, and he tenses up, waiting for the pity he hates, the awkward pat on the arm, the hollow I’m so sorry. She just nods, says she still leaves the car radio tuned to her ex-husband’s favorite classic rock station sometimes, even though she hates most of the songs.
The sun dips below the tree line, turning the sky soft pink and tangerine, and the neighbors have mostly stopped staring, gone back to their own conversations, their own grills, their own quiet dramas. She says she has a 1810 map of the early wagon trails that predated the Blue Ridge Parkway, stuck in a thrifted oak frame in her guest room, she can’t figure out if the smudge along the French Broad River is water damage or a deliberate mark left by the surveyor. She asks if he wants to come take a look, says she has a six pack of the same lager he’s drinking in her fridge, no strings attached. He hesitates for half a second, glances at his house two blocks over, the dark porch, the frozen meatloaf dinner he’d planned on eating alone when he got home, the stack of unopened junk mail on his kitchen table. He downs the last of his beer, crumples the can in his hand, nods.
They walk down the sidewalk together, slow, stepping over discarded water balloons and half-eaten cherry popsicle sticks, their shoulders brushing every few steps. She’s telling him about the time she tried to hike the entire Appalachian Trail when she was 22, quit after three weeks because she missed pepperoni pizza too much, and he’s laughing, a low, rough sound he hasn’t pulled out in years. When they reach her front porch, she digs her keys out of the back pocket of her cutoff denim shorts, and her thumb brushes the back of his hand when she passes him the folded, yellowed map she’d tucked in her bag to show him on the walk over.
