Rafe Mendez, 53, makes his living rewiring vintage neon signs out of a defunct 1950s Tillamook Texaco station, the kind of guy who will drop everything at 2 a.m. to fix a fishing boat’s navigation lights for a local captain and refuse payment every time. He’s spent the seven years since his divorce deliberately keeping his romantic life nonexistent, terrified of stirring up small-town gossip that would make the people he’s grown to care about uncomfortable. That people-pleasing streak is his worst flaw, the one that made him stay in his miserable marriage three years longer than he should have.
He’s manning a booth at the town’s first post-pandemic summer street fair when he sees her, a row of restored 1970s beer signs humming behind him, the air thick with the smell of fried Oreos and salt off the nearby bay. His fingers are smudged with neon tube phosphor, his faded Carhartt shirt damp with sweat under the 82-degree sun, when Lena Marquez leans against the edge of his folding table, a sweating cup of pink lemonade in one hand, a half-eaten elephant ear in the other. She’s his ex-wife’s younger cousin, 10 years his junior, the one who used to crash on his couch when she was in college, who he’d secretly thought was too bright, too loud, too alive for the stuffy family he’d married into. He hasn’t seen her in six years, not since the divorce papers were signed.
She teases him first, pointing at the glowing Pabst Blue Ribbon sign strung above his booth, saying she still has the broken neon keychain he fixed for her when she was 20. She leans in when he speaks, close enough that he can smell coconut shampoo and the faint smoky tang of the fair’s fire pits, her elbow brushing his forearm when she reaches for a stack of his business cards. When a group of kids chasing a balloon animal dart between the booths, she stumbles forward, her hand landing on his bicep to steady herself, and he feels a jolt run up his spine, sharp and warm as the tingle he gets when he tests a live neon circuit.
He’s torn immediately, every people-pleasing instinct screaming that this is a bad idea, that if anyone sees them flirting the entire family will hear about it by sundown, that he’ll spend the next year fielding awkward questions at the VFW fish fry. But he can’t look away from the silver streaks threading through her dark wavy hair, the freckles scattered across her nose, the way she licks a smudge of powdered sugar off her lower lip like she knows exactly what she’s doing to him. When he hands her a custom tiny neon salmon keychain he made for his regulars, their fingers brush for half a second, and he forgets what he was going to say mid-sentence.
She asks him if he wants to ditch the fair once he packs up his booth, drive down to the old river landing where they used to have bonfires back when he first moved to town. He hesitates, glancing over at the guys at the next booth selling homemade jerky, who are already snickering and giving him knowing nods. She tilts her head, her thumb brushing the back of his hand where it rests on the table, and says she’s only in town for three days for her grandma’s 80th birthday, she doesn’t care what anyone thinks, she’s always thought he was too good for her cousin anyway.
That’s all it takes to break through his overthinking. He shoves his signs and fliers into the back of his beat-up Ford F-150 in 10 minutes flat, ignores the catcalls from the jerky guys, holds the passenger door open for her like he’s been waiting to do it for 20 years. They drive with the windows down, Merle Haggard crackling on the old truck radio, the wind tangling her hair as she yells over the sound of the engine about her job as a wildlife biologist in Alaska, the polar bears she’s tracked, the ice fishing trips she takes every winter.
He spreads a frayed wool blanket he keeps in the truck bed for late-night fishing trips on the grass by the water, the sun dipping low over the bay, painting the sky pink and orange. She sits down so close their shoulders are pressed together, her bare leg brushing his denim-clad one, and rests her hand on his thigh, her palm warm through the worn fabric. He laces his calloused fingers through hers, no rush, no pressure, no overthinking about what comes next. When she leans in to kiss him, the faint taste of lemonade and powdered sugar on her tongue tastes better than any win he’s had in the last seven years.
