Manny Rios, 52, has restored 72 vintage campers in the eight years since he moved to central Oregon, post-divorce, and he’d rather sand aluminum for 12 hours straight than make small talk with strangers at the monthly Madras craft fair. He’s sweating through the armpits of his faded Carhartt, a half-warm root beer sweating next to his stack of custom drawer pulls and aluminum window latches, when he spots her. He’d know that scar above her left eyebrow anywhere, the thin silver line left by the 2014 ATV crash on his old property, back when he was still married, back when she was just his ex-wife’s prickly, motorcycle-riding cousin who never said two words to him that weren’t sarcastic.
He tenses up immediately, his hand hovering over the stack of receipts. Last time they saw each other was at divorce mediation, three seats down from his ex, glaring at him like he’d personally burned down the family cabin. She leans her hip against the edge of his booth, her cutoff denim shorts brushing the edge of his work boot, and the smell of coconut sunscreen and cherry seltzer hits him sharp, brighter than the 92-degree July sun beating down on the fairgrounds. She picks up a brushed aluminum drawer pull, twists it between her fingers, and when she looks up at him, she’s grinning, not the sharp, mean grin he remembers, soft around the edges, the corners of her eyes crinkling.
She says she heard he’s the only restorer within 300 miles who doesn’t cut corners on 1970s Boler interiors, that she just bought one sight unseen off Craigslist last month, needs the whole inside gutted and redone. He almost says no. Almost tells her he’s booked solid for six months, that he doesn’t take jobs from people connected to his ex, that he’d rather not drag old messes into his quiet, predictable life. But then she reaches across the booth to set the pull down, her bare arm brushing his for half a second, and he feels the callus on her forearm, rough from the custom cutting boards she sells at the same fair, he realizes. He’s seen her booth a dozen times, always walked the other way.
They banter for 20 minutes, the line of customers at his booth dying down as the fair winds toward closing. She teases him about how he used to refuse to dance at family weddings, standing in the corner drinking beer while everyone else did the two-step, and he teases her back about crashing his ATV, about how he had to lie to his ex and say he’d been the one driving so she wouldn’t get yelled at. She blinks, like she didn’t know that, and her shoulder presses against his bicep when she leans in to look at the photos of his past builds on his phone, warm through the thin cotton of his shirt. She holds his gaze for three full seconds after he’s done scrolling, and he finds himself glancing down at her mouth, at the chipped cherry lip gloss she’s wearing, before he yanks his eyes away, flustered, a feeling he hasn’t had since he was 17 and fumbled through his first date at a drive-in movie.
When she hands him a $500 cash deposit, their fingers linger, her thumb brushing the scar across his knuckle from a sander accident last winter, and he doesn’t pull away. She asks if he wants to grab a beer at the dive bar down the street once they pack up their booths, and he almost makes up an excuse, almost says he has a camper he needs to finish sanding that night, but then she twists the silver turquoise ring on her index finger, the same one she was wearing the day he cleaned the cut above her eyebrow in his garage, the same one she’d been twisting back then when she mumbled a quiet thank you and ran off before his ex pulled up. He says yes.
The bar smells like fried pickles and old beer, and they sit in a booth in the back, their knees brushing under the Formica table the whole time. She admits she always thought he was hot back when he was married, but hated how small he got around his ex, how he never joked, never talked about the camper builds he was so proud of. He admits he always thought she was the only person in his ex’s family who ever looked at him like he was more than just the guy who paid the mortgage. They finish their second beers, and she asks if he wants to come back to her rental cabin 10 minutes out of town, to see the Boler, talk through the build plans more.
He follows her in his beat-up Ford F150, the sun dipping low over the pine trees, painting the sky pink and orange. She pulls into a gravel drive next to a tiny log cabin, the white 1972 Boler parked out front, chipped paint and all. She steps out of her Subaru, walks over to his truck window, leans in, and holds out her hand. He turns off the engine, takes her hand, and steps out onto the gravel. The screen door of the Boler slams shut behind them 30 seconds later.
