Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living bringing dead neon back to life. He runs his one-man shop out of a cinder block garage in East Austin, his hands perpetually stained with phosphor dust and electrical tape adhesive, and he’s spent the last 12 years operating by two non-negotiable rules: no taking clients who’ve worked with his hack rival Jeb Carter, and no getting within 10 feet of anyone connected to Jeb, period. The first rule came after Jeb undercut him on a high-profile restaurant sign job back in 2019, then botched it so bad the owner paid Manny double to fix the mess. The second came after his ex-wife left him for a guy half his age who sold crypto out of a converted van, leaving him convinced any romantic entanglement was just a fancy way to get your heart ripped out and your favorite set of screwdrivers stolen. He’s at the Houndstooth Beer Garden on a mild October Thursday to drop off a custom 4-foot Lone Star neon sign he built for their back patio, the metal frame digging into his shoulder, when he trips over a foldable chair leg sticking out into the walkway.
A hand shoots out to catch his elbow before he faceplants into a tray of loaded nachos a server is carrying. He stumbles upright, sets the neon down gently on a vacant picnic table, and turns to say thanks, and all the snarky one-liners he’s got locked and loaded for casual interactions die in his throat. The woman in front of him has sun-streaked auburn hair pulled back in a loose braid, freckles dusting her nose, a calloused thumb pressing light into the muscle of his forearm where she’s still holding on. The faint glow of the pink “ICE COLD BEER” neon he fixed last summer gilds the edges of her hair, and she smells like coconut sunscreen and smoked cedar, like the Hill Country campgrounds he used to visit as a kid with his dad. “You must be Manny,” she says, and her voice is low, a little rough, like she spends half her day yelling over power tools too. He blinks, has no clue how she knows his name, and she smirks, finally letting go of his arm, and the absence of her touch is noticeable enough that he almost leans back into it. “I’m Lila. Jeb Carter’s ex-wife.”
His first instinct is to step back, apologize again, grab the neon and hightail it out of there before he breaks his own rule. He’s got a mental list of all the reasons this is a terrible idea: Jeb’s still a petty asshole who’d spread every garbage rumor he could make up about Manny if he found out they were talking, Manny hasn’t flirted with anyone longer than 30 seconds in over a decade, he’s got a backlog of 12 sign jobs to finish by the end of the month. But then Lila snorts, leans against the picnic table, and crosses her arms, and he notices the smudge of terracotta clay under her fingernail, the faint scar along her jaw from a pottery wheel accident a few years back, which she volunteers the story for before he can even ask. “Don’t look so terrified,” she says, nodding at the Shiner Bock the bartender sets down in front of him unprompted—he’s a regular, comes here every Friday to drink beer and spot which of his signs need a tune up. “I hate that guy more than you do. He left 17 half-empty resin cans in our guest bathroom when he moved out, and he tried to take my favorite pottery wheel in the divorce. Judge told him to kick rocks.”
He laughs before he can stop himself. He sits down on the picnic table bench, a full foot of space between them at first, but as she tells story after story about Jeb’s various failures—how he once tried to install a neon sign in an east side taco shop and blew the entire building’s power for three hours, how he couldn’t boil pasta without burning the pan so bad the smoke alarm went off—he finds himself leaning in, the space between them shrinking until their knees brush under the table every time one of them shifts. The country cover band on the small stage switches to a slow George Strait track, the smoke from the brisket food truck curls through the air, and when Lila leans in to yell over a group of college kids cheering for a cornhole win, her hair brushes his cheek, and he doesn’t flinch. He hasn’t felt this relaxed around another person he’s attracted to in so long he can barely remember what it felt like, the usual tightness in his chest when he talks to someone new melting away like old solder under a heat gun.
She asks him if he does custom neon for small studios, says she runs a pottery shop three blocks over, and she’s been wanting a little sign that says “WET CLAY” above her main wheel for months, but she refused to call Jeb even though he kept leaving flyers in her mailbox. He’s about to dig his professional, boring business card out of his flannel pocket, the safe, rule-abiding move, when she reaches across the table and brushes a stray strand of gray-streaked hair off his forehead, her fingers grazing his temple light as a feather. “Or you could just come see the space now,” she says, holding his eye contact, no smirk this time, just a quiet, unmistakeable invitation. He hesitates for half a second, thinks of his two stupid rules, thinks of Jeb’s stupid smug face, thinks of how cold his empty house is going to be when he goes home alone to eat leftover tamales and watch old westerns tonight.
He stands up, slings his worn canvas tool bag over his shoulder, and nods. She grins, grabs her woven tote bag from where it’s sitting on the bench, and when they walk out of the beer garden together, her shoulder bumps his every few steps, the neon signs he built all down the block glowing pink and electric blue against the darkening October sky, and she laces her fingers through his when they cross the street.
