Rafe O’Malley, 52, makes his living bringing dead neon back to life. He runs his repair shop out of a cinder block garage in East Austin, his fingers perpetually smudged with solder and phosphor, his truck bed stacked full of cracked glass tubes and rusted sign frames he salvages from closed-down bars and shuttered roadside diners. Eight years prior, his wife left him for a 27-year-old tech bro who’d hired Rafe to fix a neon Pong sign for his downtown condo, and ever since, Rafe’s avoided anything that even smells like romantic entanglement. He’s convinced he’s too old for games, too set in his ways, too likely to make a fool of himself chasing something that doesn’t exist.
He’s at the local VFW post’s annual spring fish fry on a sticky 82-degree April evening, leaning against a splintered picnic table and sipping a lukewarm Shiner Bock, when she approaches. The neon Lonestar sign he just finished reinstalling glows pink and electric blue behind her, casting streaks of color across the frayed hem of her cutoff jeans, the faded Willie Nelson tee stretched tight across her shoulders, the smudge of cornmeal dusting her left forearm. She’s Clara Bennett, 38, the new auxiliary president, her dad a Vietnam vet who’d been a regular at the post until he died two years prior. She moved back to Austin from Dallas six months earlier, fresh off a messy divorce, and she’d tracked Rafe down three weeks prior begging him to fix the sign, which had been dark since 2019.
Rafe’s first instinct is to step back, to mumble a thanks and make an excuse to leave. He tells himself she’s just being polite, that the last thing he needs is the entire VFW gossip mill spinning about him hitting on the new auxiliary president, that he’s 14 years older than her for Christ’s sake, that anyone who sees them together will assume he’s some sad old creep chasing a younger woman. He’s disgusted with the way his pulse picks up when she grins, the way he can’t stop glancing at the little scar on her jaw from a bike crash when she was 16, the way he wants to brush that cornmeal smudge off her forearm himself. But the desire is there, warm and sharp and impossible to ignore, the kind of spark he thought he’d burned out for good after the divorce.
She nods toward the tree line at the back of the post’s property, where the creek cuts through the oak grove, and yells over the music, “Wanna walk down there for a minute? I got something I wanna ask you, and I don’t wanna yell over Johnny Cash.” Rafe hesitates for half a second, then nods, following her across the patchy grass, the crunch of discarded paper plates and beer cans under his work boots. The noise of the fry fades the further they get from the pavilion, replaced by the chirp of crickets and the soft gurgle of the creek running over smooth river rocks. She kicks off her cowboy boots when they hit the bank, rolling her jeans up to her calves, and steps into the shallow water, shivering a little at the cold. He follows suit, his socks getting damp when he steps in, and for a second he feels stupid, a grown man wading in a creek like a teenager on a first date.
She sits down on a flat limestone rock half submerged in the water, patting the spot next to her, and he sits, their knees pressing together through the thin fabric of their jeans. She tells him she has the old neon Coors sign that hung in her dad’s garage for 40 years, the glass cracked, the transformer dead, and she wants him to fix it for the guest room she’s fixing up in the house she just bought. “Everyone says you’re the guy who fixes old stuff that everyone else thinks is too far gone,” she says, and Rafe laughs, shaking his head. “That’s just signs,” he says. “Not people.” She leans in a little closer, and he can see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes, can smell the beer on her breath mixed with the peppermint gum she’s chewing. She reaches up, brushing a crumb of hushpuppy off his chin with her thumb, the pad of her finger grazing the rough stubble on his jaw, and says, “I think that’s bullshit.”
He doesn’t pull away. For the first time in eight years, he doesn’t make an excuse, doesn’t talk himself out of it, doesn’t worry about what anyone else will say. They sit there for 45 minutes, talking about her dad, about his ex-wife, about the way everyone seems to be in a hurry to throw out old things just because something newer and shinier comes along. The sun dips below the treeline, painting the sky pink and orange, when they walk back up to the parking lot. She stops next to her beat-up 2008 Ford F150, handing him a crumpled paper bag with a leftover piece of catfish and a slip of notebook paper with her phone number scrawled on it in blue Sharpie. She leans up, kissing him soft on the sunburned curve of his cheek, her lips warm against his skin, and says she’ll call him first thing tomorrow to talk about the sign.
He tucks the slip of paper into the pocket of his work shirt, climbs into his own truck, and turns the key in the ignition. The radio cuts on to a Johnny Cash song he hasn’t heard since he was a kid, riding around in his dad’s pickup, and he smiles, turning up the volume before he pulls out of the parking lot.
