Moe Pritchard, 51, makes his living patching rust, rewiring frayed lamp cords, and sanding water-damaged wood paneling out of a converted tobacco barn 20 minutes outside Asheville, North Carolina. His personality flaw, per his older sister’s annual holiday roast, is that he’s stubborn enough to cut off his own nose to spite his face: three years out from a messy divorce from his high school sweetheart, he’d sworn off dating anyone younger than 48, convinced anyone below that line only wanted free labor on their camper flips or access to his 40 acres of mountain land for influencer photo shoots. He’d stuck to that rule religiously, even when the 47-year-old realtor who’d bought his old house left her number taped to his shop door last summer.
He’s at the annual Blue Ridge Vintage Camper Rally on a mid-April Saturday, koozie-wrapped Pabst in one hand, leaning against the polished aluminum side of the 1962 Airstream Bambi he’d spent six months restoring for a client in Florida. The air smells like pine, charred bratwurst from the food truck at the gate, and the faint, acrid tang of old camper sealant. A group of retirees from Ohio have just left his booth, oohing over the custom penny tile backsplash he’d laid, when he sees her walk up.
It’s Lila Marlow. He’d known her since she was 10, when his ex-wife would drag her along on their weekend fishing trips, pigtailed and covered in glitter, begging him to teach her to cast a line. She’s 32 now, he remembers, because his ex had texted him a photo of her college graduation two years prior. He’d been ignoring her DMs for six months, all asking for tips on restoring her late grandma’s 1958 Scotty Sportsman, writing them off as another kid looking for free work. Now she’s standing three feet away, cutoff shorts showing sun-freckled thighs, a faded Pearl Jam tee tucked into her waistband, holding a lemon seltzer in one hand. She grins, and he can see the same gap between her two front teeth she had when she was little.
She leans in to get a closer look at the tile, and her shoulder brushes his bare bicep, sun-warmed and soft. He catches a whiff of coconut sunscreen and vanilla lip balm, and his neck goes hot. He tells himself to get a grip, she’s practically family, this is wrong. But she’s asking him about the sealant he used on the Bambi’s window frames, and she actually listens when he answers, nodding, not scrolling through her phone while he talks. When they both reach for the sample tile he has sitting on the folding table next to him, their fingers brush, and he yanks his hand back like he touched a hot soldering iron. She laughs, low and warm, not teasing, not offended.
He finds himself walking with her three rows over to her Scotty, which is parked between a beat-up 1970s Winnebago and a tiny teardrop trailer decked out in fairy lights. The Scotty’s a mess: rusted wheel wells, a dent in the roof from a falling tree limb, water stains streaked down the interior paneling. He kneels down to check the steel frame for rot, and she kneels next to him, her bare knee pressing firm against his jeans. She points to a hole in the linoleum by the door, and her hand brushes his knee when she gestures, leaving a tingle that lingers for 10 full seconds.
He’s half-ready to offer her a discounted rate for parts and labor, just to get her to stop looking at him like that, like he’s the only person in the whole rally who knows what he’s talking about, when she cuts him off. “I don’t want a discount,” she says, holding eye contact so long he has to fight the urge to look away. “I want you to teach me how to fix it myself. And I want to take you to dinner first. No camper talk for the first hour. Deal?”
He freezes. His stupid rule pops into his head first, then the memory of three years of frozen dinners alone in his trailer, of going on fishing trips by himself, of no one asking him how his day was when he got home covered in rust dust. He remembers how she’d brought him a homemade peanut butter cookie when his dad died 12 years prior, how she’d sat on his porch and didn’t say anything, just passed him another beer when he finished his first. He’s not disgusted anymore, not at her, not at himself. He’s just curious, and a little giddy, like he’s about to sneak out after curfew when he was 17.
They drive down to the dive bar 10 minutes from the rally grounds, the one with the peanut-shell covered floor and the jukebox that only plays 90s rock. He orders bourbon on the rocks, she orders the same, and he laughs when she tells him she’d developed a taste for it after stealing sips of his when he wasn’t looking on those old fishing trips. She teases him about the mullet he had in his 20s, he teases her about the time she fell in the lake and cried for 20 minutes because her sparkly plastic sandals sank to the bottom. The jukebox plays a Nirvana track he hasn’t heard in years, and she taps her boot along to the beat under the table.
When she reaches across the Formica table to steal a fry off his plate, her knuckles brush his wrist, and he doesn’t pull away.
