Manny Ruiz, 53, has run his vintage motorcycle restoration shop out of a converted East Austin garage for 18 years, and up until last Saturday, he hadn’t attended a neighborhood block party in the entire time he’d lived two blocks over. His flaw is simple: he’s spent the 8 years since his ex-wife left him for a SaaS sales bro who collected limited-edition sneakers convinced he’s too set in his grease-stained, routine-heavy ways to be worth anyone’s casual attention, let alone anything more. He’d turned down three separate invitations to neighborhood events in the last three months, even left his porch light off during Halloween so trick-or-treaters wouldn’t knock. He only showed up to this one because his 16-year-old apprentice Javi begged him, said the al pastor taco truck parked at the end of the block made the best in the city, and Manny owed him for covering three straight days of shop duty while Javi attended his grandma’s funeral in Laredo.
The air smelled like grilled carne asada, cinnamon, and burnt marshmallows, mariachi trumpets humming from the street corner where a group of local teens played for tips. Manny leaned against a gnarled live oak, sipping a Shiner Bock he’d grabbed from a cooler someone left out, watching a pack of kids chase a brindle pitbull down the sidewalk, when someone bumped hard into his left shoulder. He turned, ready to grumble, when he saw the woman two doors down from him, the new librarian who’d moved in three months prior, holding a dented metal tray stacked high with conchas, powdered sugar dusting the front of his dark gray flannel shirt.
She didn’t apologize right away, just laughed, a warm, throaty sound that cut through the noise of the party. “Nice shirt. I’ve been wanting to mark up one of those grumpy recluse flannels everyone around here wears since I moved in.” Her nails were painted deep burgundy, chipped at the edges, and when she reached out to brush a clump of powdered sugar off his wrist, her skin was cool, smelled like jasmine and old paper. Manny froze for half a second, his first instinct to step back, make an excuse about getting back to the shop, but then he spotted the tiny 1972 CB750 tattoo wrapped around her left ankle, peeking out from under the hem of her high-waisted jeans.
He offered to carry her tray to the dessert table set up on a neighbor’s front lawn, and they walked side by side, their arms brushing every other step, the sugar dust sticking to the grease smudges he’d missed washing off his forearm that morning. She told him her name was Lila, she’d moved to Austin from Chicago to run the adult literacy program at the public library down the street, she’d recognized the CB750 parked in front of his shop when she was walking her rescue pitbull last week, that her dad had owned the exact same model before he died, left her a box of old parts she had no clue what to do with.
They bailed on the dessert table ten minutes later, sitting on the curb a block away from the crowd, sharing a cinnamon concha, the sticky icing melting on Manny’s fingertips. He told her about his ex, about how she’d left saying he was too boring, too happy to spend every weekend covered in motorcycle grease instead of flying to Cabo or going to wine tastings, and Lila snickered, kicking a crumpled beer can across the street, said her ex-husband was a corporate lawyer who’d hated anything that didn’t come with a branded golf shirt and a six-figure price tag, had called her obsession with old bikes “a childish waste of time.”
Their knees pressed together as they sat, the denim of their jeans rough against each other, and Manny felt that familiar war in his chest: part of him screaming that this was a mistake, that he was out of practice, that he’d just end up getting hurt again, the other part warm, curious, like he was 19 again and talking to a girl at a San Antonio bike show for the first time. Lila leaned in when he talked about the 1968 Harley he was restoring for a customer in Dallas, her eyes locked on his, no glancing away, no awkward fidgeting, and when a crumb of concha stuck to her lower lip, he reached out without thinking, brushed it off with the pad of his thumb.
She didn’t flinch, didn’t lean back, just smiled, the corner of her mouth tugging up, and asked him if he wanted to walk back to her house, check out the box of parts her dad left her, see if any of them were salvageable. Manny hesitated for half a second, thought about the half-disassembled engine waiting for him in his shop, thought about the 8 years he’d spent going home to an empty house, eating frozen burritos alone while he watched old motorcycle races on TV, then nodded.
They walked back to her place slowly, the mariachi music fading behind them, the crunch of live oak leaves under their shoes, and when they stepped up onto her front porch, her brindle pitbull, the same one he’d seen the kids chasing earlier, came bounding up to the door, wagging her whole body. Lila unlocked the door, stepped aside to let him in, and Manny spotted a stack of vintage motorcycle repair manuals on her coffee table right next to a pile of pulpy 80s romance novels, her hand brushing the small of his back as she walked past him to grab two cold Modelos from the fridge.
