Rafe Mendez, 53, has restored 72 vintage campers out of his gravel lot outside Asheville, North Carolina, in the 17 years he’s run the business. His only consistent flaw, if you ask his childhood buddy Jimmie, is that he’s turned down every dinner, drink, and blind date offered to him since his wife left for a solar sales gig in Arizona eight years prior. He’s got a routine, he likes it, and the only time he deviates is when Jimmie begs hard enough—like for the annual county fire department chili cookoff, where Rafe now stands sweating through the cuffs of his gray flannel, holding a bowl of five-alarm chili so spicy his sinuses have been clear for 20 straight minutes, the burn lingering on the tip of his tongue.
He’s halfway to dumping the rest of the bowl in the bed of his beat-up 2004 Ford F-150 when he spots her. Lila Hale, 48, the new mayor’s wife. He’d only seen her once before, two weeks prior at the town hall meeting where her husband spent 12 minutes chewing Rafe out for “unpermitted outdoor storage” of a 1972 Airstream a client had dropped off three days earlier. Back then she’d been wearing a tailored cream sheath dress, standing quiet in the back of the room, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve. Now she’s in a faded red plaid flannel, jeans cuffed at the ankle, work boots caked in mud, holding a paper plate stacked with crumbly cornbread still dusted with powdered sugar.
She makes eye contact across the crowd, smiles, and before Rafe can duck behind the truck bed she’s walking over. She moves fast, her boots crunching on crumpled fallen oak leaves, and when she skids to a stop a foot away from him he can smell cinnamon gum and pine cleaner on her clothes, sharp and warm, like the cabin his grandma used to own up in the mountains. “You’re Rafe, the camper guy, right?” she says, leaning in a little to be heard over the group of drunk firefighters yelling about a cornhole score. Her shoulder brushes his bicep when she shifts her weight, and he can feel the heat of her through both their flannels, soft and unexpected.
He nods, already tense. He hates her husband, hates the way the guy strutted into town six months ago acting like he owned every gravel lot and overgrown side road, and the last thing he needs is to be caught chatting up the mayor’s wife at a public event that half the town is at. “I need your help,” she says, before he can make an excuse to leave. She reaches for the extra napkin sticking out of his back pocket, and her fingers brush his wrist when she grabs it, the callus on her index finger rough against his skin—from turning book pages, he later learns, she’s the town’s new part-time librarian, too, when she’s not dragged to campaign events. “My dad left me a 1968 VW Westfalia when he died last spring. Sea foam green, original upholstery, the whole nine yards. It’s been sitting in a barn up in Mars Hill, rotting. My husband says it’s a waste of space, says I should scrap it for $300. I don’t want to scrap it.”
Rafe blinks. He’s got a six-month waiting list for full restorations, and he told himself he wasn’t taking any new side projects this quarter. But she’s leaning in closer now, her dark eyes fixed on his, no trace of the quiet, detached woman he saw at the town hall. She laughs when he makes a dumb joke about her husband’s terrible spray tan and even worse perm, the sound bright and unforced, and when a kid runs past chasing a golden retriever she grabs his forearm to steady herself, her palm warm even through the thick flannel.
He’s torn. Part of him wants to tell her no, wants to go home, drink a cold IPA, and work on the Airstream’s aluminum paneling like he planned. The other part of him can’t remember the last time someone looked at him like he wasn’t just the grumpy camper guy who hates town meetings and avoids small talk. She asks if he wants to walk over to the hot cider stand, away from the noise, and he says yes before he can overthink it.
The line for cider is short, and when they get their cups they lean against the split-rail fence surrounding the park, the string lights strung above them casting soft gold over the streaks of chestnut in her dark hair. The cider is spiked with nutmeg and a little bourbon, warm going down his throat. She tells him she married the mayor three years ago, when he was still a laid-back high school history teacher in Charlotte, that she had no idea he’d turn into the kind of guy who yells at small business owners over $25 permit technicalities. “I hate this,” she says, nodding over at the stage where her husband is yelling into a megaphone about the 50/50 raffle, his tie askew, face red from too much chili. “I moved here to read books, fix up old midcentury furniture, not go to ribbon cuttings and pretend I care about rezoning parking lots downtown.” She pauses, sips her cider, and slips her hand into his for two, three slow heartbeats, her fingers cold from the frosted paper cup. “I’ll pay you double your usual rate. Off the books. No one has to know we’re working together, not until it’s done. He’s at a state municipal conference all day Saturday. I can drop it off at your lot at 7 a.m., no one will see.”
Rafe stares at their linked hands for a second, then nods. “Yeah,” he says. “I can do that.” He pulls his beat-up iPhone 8 out of his jeans pocket, hands it to her, and she types her number in, her thumb brushing his when she passes it back. She tells him she’ll text him the exact address of the barn if he wants to come look at it Friday evening, when her husband is at a campaign dinner an hour outside of town.
She squeezes his wrist one more time, hard enough that he’ll feel the indent of her nails for an hour after, then turns and walks back toward the stage, waving when one of the librarian volunteers calls her name. Rafe stands there, sipping his now cold cider, the spot on his wrist still tingling where she touched him. For the first time in eight years, he’s not dreading the end of his weekend routine, not already mentally listing the chores he’ll cram into every spare minute. He watches her lean up to whisper something in her husband’s ear, the mayor barely glancing away from the megaphone to nod at her, and he smirks when she catches his eye across the crowd and winks.
