Rafe Mendez, 57, spent 32 years as an air traffic controller before he cashed out his pension, divorced his cheating wife, and moved to a 2-acre plot outside Lisbon, Ohio, where he restores vintage Ford pickups and lets his hound dog Max nap on his workbench. His biggest flaw, one he’ll admit to after three Yuenglings, is that he hasn’t so much as bought a woman a drink in 12 years, convinced every single person his age comes with hidden baggage he doesn’t have the patience to unpack. He’s at the annual Lisbon Fireman’s Carnival on a sticky late August Thursday for one reason only: the demolition derby, and the ice-cold beer tent where he can avoid small talk with neighbors who still ask after his ex.
He’s leaning against a splintered wooden post, half-watching a beat-up 1998 Pontiac Grand Am slam into the side of a minivan, when a shoulder knocks hard into his bicep. He turns, ready to snap, and freezes. Lila Marquez is standing there, 49, silver streaks cutting through her wavy dark hair, a cutoff plaid flannel slung over a white tank top, freckles across her nose he never noticed when she was a teenager tagging along to his and her sister’s cookouts 25 years prior. She grins, holding two dripping beer cans, and says she saw his dented 1968 F100 parked by the entrance and knew it was him.
His first instinct is to walk away. He hasn’t spoken to anyone from his ex-wife’s family since the day he moved out, still raw from them taking her side during the divorce. But she shoves a beer into his hand before he can protest, her fingers brushing his calloused knuckles, and says she hasn’t spoken to her sister in three years, not after she found out she’d cheated on her second husband with their kid’s soccer coach. “She’s always been garbage,” she says, leaning in so he can hear her over the roar of the derby engines, her forearm brushing his when she nods at the minivan that just lost its back bumper. “I never blamed you for bailing.”
He doesn’t know what to say, so he takes a long sip of beer. The ferris wheel behind her is flashing neon pink, casting a warm glow over the clay dust caked under her chipped nail polish, the silver crescent ring she twists around her index finger when she talks. She’s a traveling ceramicist, she tells him, in town for the week to sell mugs at the carnival’s craft booth. She teases him for still wearing the same scuffed work boots he wore when he’d take her fishing at the lake behind their old house, for the faded OSU ballcap pulled low over his graying temples. Every time she laughs, her shoulder bumps his, and he doesn’t move away.
The derby ends right as the first firework bursts green, and the crowd in the beer tent surges forward to get a better look. Someone slams into Lila from behind, and she stumbles, her hand wrapping around his wrist to steady herself, her chest brushing his bicep. He can smell her perfume, cedar and vanilla, nothing like the cloying rose his ex used to douse herself in. She tilts her head up to look at him, gold fireworks reflecting in her dark eyes, and says she’s had a crush on him since she was 16, never said anything because he was married, and then everything blew up before she had the chance.
For a second, that old, familiar anger pricks at him—this is wrong, it’s messy, it’s the kind of drama he’s spent a decade running from. But then she squeezes his wrist, soft, and he realizes the anger he’s carried for 12 years isn’t even for his ex anymore. It’s for himself, for locking himself away from anything that might feel good just because he got burned once. He doesn’t say anything, just laces his fingers through hers, her palm sticky with beer sweat and rough with old clay scars.
When the last firework fades, the crowd starts to disperse, kids screaming as their parents herd them toward the parking lot. She tugs his hand a little, says she’s renting the little blue cottage on Main Street for the week, she made a mug with a 1972 F150 etched into the side a few months back, kept it even when a guy offered her $75 for it at a market in Cleveland, because she knew she’d run into him eventually. He nods, and they walk slow past the closed carnival booths, the smell of cotton candy and burnt hot dogs lingering in the cool night air, Max curled up on his porch already forgotten for the first time all week.
