Rafe Mendoza, 52, spends 40 hours a week sanding dents out of 1960s Airstreams and reupholstering their dinette booths for clients who fly in from as far as Maine to hire him. He’s run his restoration shop out of a converted cedar barn outside Austin for 11 years, ever since his divorce left him with half the savings and zero patience for the performative couple’s events his ex used to drag him to. His worst flaw, the one he’d never admit out loud, is that he’s spent the last 8 years mocking his buddies for their predictable midlife crises: the sports cars, the 20-something girlfriends, the sad attempts at recapturing a youth they never even liked that much the first time around. He’s made a point of being the boring, responsible one, the guy who goes home to his hound dog Diesel every night, who only drinks two beers at the monthly classic car meetup at the downtown beer garden, who never flirts with anyone younger than 40 on principle.
He was leaning against the side of his beat-up 1972 Ford F-250, sipping a shandy and passing peanut shells to Diesel at his feet, when Lila walked over. She’d moved into the cottage 300 yards from his shop three weeks prior, the daughter of his old high school lab partner who’d asked him to “keep an eye on her” when she relocated after a wildland firefighting season in Idaho. She was in a faded US Forest Service hoodie with the cuffs cut off, frayed denim cutoffs, and work boots still caked with pine resin from the hiking trip she’d taken the weekend before. She hopped up on his truck’s tailgate without asking, and their elbows brushed when she reached for the bucket of salted peanuts he had sitting next to him. The scent of pine smoke and bright citrus shampoo hit him before she spoke, sharp and warm, nothing like the heavy perfume his ex used to douse herself in.
They talked for 45 minutes, first about the candy-apple red 1967 Camaro that just pulled into the lot, then about the leaky faucet she’d been patching in her cottage, then about the second-degree burn scar snaking up her left forearm that she’d gotten when a tree branch collapsed on her line outside Boise. He caught himself staring at the scar mid-sentence, heat rising up his neck, and was about to stammer out an apology when she ran her index finger along the raised edge of the tissue, grinning. “Most guys get weirded out by it,” she said, shrugging. “Think it’s gross.” He shook his head before he could think better of it. “Looks like a hell of a story,” he said. “Not gross.”
The crowd roared when the emcee announced the 50/50 raffle winner, and she leaned in so close to hear his response over the noise that the ends of her sun-bleached brown hair brushed his jaw. He froze, his beer halfway to his mouth, every nerve in his body lighting up like a bad Christmas tree. For half a second he wanted to pull away, to remind himself that she was 34, that her mom was his friend, that this was exactly the stupid cliché he’d spent years making fun of. But then she laughed at a dumb joke he made about the guy who’d shown up to the meetup with a neon green Corvette and a fake tan, and the sound of it cut through the noise in his head, warm and rough and nothing like he’d expected.
By 10pm the crowd had thinned out, the last of the classic cars pulling out of the lot, crickets chirping loud enough to drown out the distant bar music. He was walking her to her beat-up Subaru when she stopped in the middle of the gravel path, turning to face him, her boots kicking up small clouds of dust. “I know you think you’re supposed to be the responsible neighbor guy,” she said, her voice low, no hint of teasing in it. “I know you think this is the kind of midlife garbage you make fun of your friends for. But I’ve seen you looking. I’ve been looking too.”
He opened his mouth to protest, to say her mom would kill him, that people would talk, that he was too old for this kind of mess, but she cut him off with a laugh, shaking her head. “My mom’s been bugging me to ask you out for two weeks,” she said. “Says you’re the only guy within 20 miles who knows how to fix anything and doesn’t spend every weekend complaining about his ex-wife.”
Rafe snorted, surprised, the tight knot of anxiety in his chest unraveling fast. He’d spent so long building up the taboo in his head, so long telling himself desire was something to be ashamed of if it didn’t fit the boring, respectable box he’d built for himself, that he’d forgotten how good it felt to not overthink every small thing. She stepped closer, putting one hand flat on his chest, right over the faded travel trailer logo stitched to his work shirt, and he didn’t pull away. He leaned down, kissed her slow, tasting the peach hard seltzer she’d been drinking all night, the faint salt of sweat from the humid Texas summer air sticking to her skin.
They drove back to their properties separately, Diesel snoring in the passenger seat of his truck the whole way. He walked in the door of his small house attached to the barn, had barely kicked off his work boots when his phone pinged. It was a photo of Lila holding two mugs of coffee on her cottage kitchen counter, the text below it reading “water heater parts in your truck still? I’ve got pancakes in the fridge.” He typed back a quick “Be there in 10” before setting his phone down on the workbench by the door, grinning so wide his cheeks ached, and Diesel lifted his head, thumped his tail once against the concrete floor before going back to sleep.
