Javi Mendez, 59, spends 60 hours a week sanding rust off 1970s Airstreams and reupholstering their dinette cushions for clients who drive up from Atlanta and Charlotte, paying top dollar to recapture some vague childhood vacation nostalgia. He’s avoided the county’s annual peach festival for seven straight years, ever since his wife left him for a real estate agent with a white smile and a boat, convinced half the town still whispers about the split when he walks into the grocery store. His only friend, a retired game warden named Earl, practically had to drag him out of the barn at 4 PM, saying if he spent one more night alone eating frozen burritos and watching old westerns he was gonna turn into the barn’s new mascot.
He’s leaning against a cinder block by the beer tent, sweating through the collar of his faded Carhartt, half listening to a guy ramble about his 1968 Winnebago, when a woman carrying a stack of paper plates loaded with peach cobbler trips over the cooler at his feet. He reacts fast, years of hauling heavy propane tanks and jacking up campers giving him reflexes most guys his age lost a decade back, catches her elbow with one hand, steadying her before she faceplants into a patch of clover. Her free hand slaps against his chest to steady herself, leaving a sticky smudge of peach syrup on his shirt, and she laughs so hard she snorts, dropping one of the plates on the grass.
He recognizes her immediately: Lila, his ex-wife’s cousin, the kid who used to show up at their old house every summer begging him to fix her banged up BMX bike, who’d sit on his workbench eating popsicles while he tightened the spokes. She’s 38 now, he remembers, moved back to town three months prior to run the small public library after the previous librarian retired. She’s got the same messy brown braid she had as a kid, freckles across her nose, chipped mint green nail polish, and she smells like peach syrup and lavender hand lotion, the kind that doesn’t reek like cheap drugstore perfume.
“Shit, sorry,” she says, wiping the syrup off his shirt with a napkin she pulls from her back pocket, her palm brushing his sternum through the thin fabric. His skin prickles, and he steps back half a foot, suddenly hyper aware of the crowd around them, of people he’s known for 15 years glancing their way. “Forgot those coolers got moved after the rain turned the ground to mud earlier.”
He mumbles something about it being fine, tries to think of an excuse to leave, but she sits down on the end of a nearby picnic table, patting the spot next to her. He hesitates, then sits, keeping a good six inches between them, his beer sweating in his grip. She teases him about hiding from the festival all these years, says she stopped by his shop three times in the past month to ask him to fix the old card catalog cabinet at the library, but he was always under a camper, covered in grease, and she didn’t want to bug him. He’s surprised, didn’t even notice, too focused on his work to pay attention to anyone who wasn’t handing him a check.
They talk for 20 minutes, the country band on the main stage playing old Alan Jackson tracks so loud he has to lean in to hear her, their shoulders brushing every time someone walks past the table. She tells him about the library’s new summer reading program for the kids out in the trailer parks, he tells her about the 1972 Airstream he’s restoring for a guy who plans to drive it all the way to Alaska next year. When she laughs, she tilts her head back, and he can see the scar on her jaw from when she crashed that BMX when she was 13, the one he drove her to the ER for, holding her hand while the doctor stitched her up.
A twist of discomfort knots his gut then. This is wrong, he thinks. She’s his ex’s cousin, 21 years younger than him, everyone in town will talk, call him a creep, say he’s going through a delayed midlife crisis. He feels a hot flash of self-disgust for even noticing how her t-shirt rides up a little when she leans forward, how her knee brushes his when she shifts on the table. But he can’t look away, either, can’t ignore the way she’s looking at him like she knows exactly what he’s thinking, like she doesn’t care what anyone else says.
She leans in, so close her breath is warm against his ear, cutting through the noise of the crowd. “You wanna get out of here?” she says. “Walk down to the creek behind the fairgrounds? It’s quiet there. No one’s gonna bother us.” He freezes for a second, every sensible part of his brain screaming no, that this is a bad idea, that he’ll regret it, that the whole town will be gossiping by tomorrow morning. Then he nods, stands up, holds out a hand to help her off the table. Her palm is warm, calloused from turning book pages and hauling stacks of novels, and she laces her fingers through his for half a second before letting go, like she’s testing him.
The walk to the creek is only five minutes, shaded by oak trees, the noise of the festival fading behind them. When they get to the bank, she sits down on a flat rock, kicks off her sneakers, dips her feet in the cold water. He sits next to her, close enough that their legs touch, and she turns to him, leans in, kisses him slow, her hand cupping the side of his face. He doesn’t pull away. He kisses her back, the taste of peach cobbler and sweet tea on her tongue, the sound of crickets chirping in the grass around them, the cold creek water seeping through the cuff of his jeans.
They stay there for an hour, talking, kissing, no rush, no pressure. She tells him she’s had a crush on him since she was 16, when he taught her how to change a tire on her first car, that she never acted on it because he was married, because she was too young. He tells her he never thought of her that way until now, that he was too wrapped up in feeling sorry for himself after the divorce to notice anyone was paying attention to him.
When they walk back to the fairgrounds, the sun is starting to set, painting the sky pink and orange. She stops at a jam stand, buys him a jar of peach habanero jam, says she knows he loves spicy food, remembers him putting hot sauce on everything when they’d have family cookouts back in the day. He doesn’t even care who sees them walking together, who sees her tuck her hand into the crook of his elbow as they cross the parking lot to his beat up 2008 F150.
He unlocks the passenger door, holds it open for her, and she climbs in, setting the jam on the center console. He walks around to the driver’s side, gets in, turns the key, the old truck rumbling to life. He shifts the truck into drive, pulls out of the parking lot, and doesn’t glance in the rearview mirror once.
