Manny Ruiz is 57, spent 28 years as a utility lineman before a 2019 fall shredded his left ACL and forced early retirement. Now he runs a 300 square foot power tool restoration shop out of his garage in Steubenville, charges half what the big hardware stores ask for rebuilds, and hasn’t so much as asked a woman out for coffee since his wife left him for a traveling insurance salesman eight years prior. His biggest flaw is that he’s convinced any deviation from his quiet, predictable routine will end in disappointment, so he avoids anything that feels like a risk even when it’s staring him right in the face.
The first bump is accidental. She’s walking backward, waving at a group of her high school friends, when her shoulder slams into his chest, iced lavender lemonade sloshing over the rim of her cup to splatter across his wrist. Cold, sweet, sticky, the scent of lavender hitting his nose before she even turns around. He recognizes her instantly: Lila Marquez, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, 52, just moved back to town last month after 15 years doing travel tax prep out of a camper van. He’s only seen her a handful of times over the last decade, always at awkward family holidays where he’d hover by the snack table to avoid small talk, and he’s always felt that stupid, unspoken hum of tension between them that he’d written off as a mistake.
She apologizes, dabbing at his wrist with a crumpled napkin from her pocket, her fingers brushing his skin on every pass. Her nails are chipped pale pink, calloused at the tips, and when she looks up at him her dark eyes hold his for three full beats too long, a smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth that says she knows exactly what he’s thinking. “Heard you’re still messing around with those old saws,” she says, leaning against the food truck right next to him, close enough that her bare arm brushes his bicep when she shifts her weight. “Got my dad’s old Stihl 026 in my garage. Been sitting for 10 years. No one else I’d trust to fix it.”
He should make an excuse. He knows the whole town talks, knows if his ex catches wind of them even standing within 10 feet of each other she’ll blow up every group chat within three county lines, knows he’s supposed to hold some kind of grudge against her family by default. But he can’t make himself leave. He can smell coconut sunscreen on her skin, undercut by the faint, sharp scent of the menthol cigarette she smoked 10 minutes earlier, can hear the jingle of the silver bracelet on her wrist when she gestures at the band playing down the block. He asks how the camper van’s holding up, and she laughs, a low, rough sound that makes his chest feel light, and tells him she parked it in the side yard of the little bungalow she bought on the west end of town, still sleeps in it half the time because she’s not used to a real bed.
They walk over to the picnic tables by the creek, his knee aching worse with every step, and she doesn’t even comment when he slows down, just matches his pace like it’s the most natural thing in the world. They sit on the splintered wooden bench, and she leans in when he talks about the Stihl, her face so close he can count the freckles across her nose, her knee brushing his under the table. She tells him she’s had a crush on him since she was 19, when he showed up to her parents’ farm in the middle of a thunderstorm, soaked to the bone, climbed a 40 foot pole in 50 mile an hour winds to fix their power before the newborn calves in the barn got too cold. She says she never said anything back then because he was married to her cousin, and she never said anything after because she thought he was still hung up on her.
His throat goes dry. He admits he’s thought about her too, every time she showed up to Christmas dinners, every time he’d see her post a photo of her van parked at a national park on Facebook, that he’d always wondered what it would be like to talk to her without his ex hovering in the corner watching their every move. He says he was scared, that people would call them trash, that it would cause too much drama. She reaches across the table, takes his calloused hand in hers, runs her thumb over the thick scar on his knuckle from a 2017 chainsaw accident, her touch warm even through the sticky leftover lemonade on his skin. “We’re both too old to care what anyone thinks,” she says, quiet enough that only he can hear it, over the sound of the crickets chirping and the kids screaming in the distance.
He agrees to come over to her place after the fair winds down to look at the Stihl. She scribbles her address on a scrap of receipt from her purse, presses it into his palm so her fingers linger for a full five seconds before she pulls away. She stands up, slings her denim jacket over her shoulder, tells him she’ll leave the porch light on for him. He watches her walk away, her jeans fitting just right over her hips, and when she gets 20 feet down the path she looks over her shoulder and winks. He tucks the receipt into the front pocket of his Carhartts, takes a sip of his warm root beer, and doesn’t even care when he sees his ex’s best friend staring at him from across the fairgrounds.
