Javi Mendez is 59, runs a vintage camper restoration shop out of a weathered red barn 15 minutes outside Asheville, North Carolina. His only consistent company is a floppy-eared hound named Gus, and his biggest flaw is that he’s carried a grudge against his ex-wife so tight for 12 years it’s given him a permanent knot between his shoulder blades. He’d skipped the town’s annual fall food truck festival every year since the divorce; it was where he’d had his first date with her, and he’d refused to taint the good parts of that memory with the sour taste of how things ended. His daughter had shown up at his shop that morning, arms crossed, and told him if he didn’t get out of the barn and interact with actual humans that day she’d cancel his subscription to the vintage parts auction site he visited every night before bed. He’d grumbled, grabbed his beat up oil-stained leather jacket, and let her drag him into town.
The air smelled like burnt sugar, wood smoke, and fried green tomatoes, the kind of crisp October air that stings your cheeks a little when the wind picks up. His daughter had vanished 20 minutes after they arrived to meet her friends, leaving him leaning against a split rail fence, sipping spiced hard cider and pretending he wasn’t enjoying the bluegrass band playing two blocks over. That’s when he caught the scent of roasted pork and red chili, rich and warm enough to cut through the chill. He followed it to a truck painted sunflower yellow, hand-painted lettering on the side that read LILA’S TAMALES, and a woman with silver streaks woven through her dark braid, flour dusted on her forearm, leaning over the counter to hand a kid a corn husk doll.
She looked up when he stepped up, and her grin was so wide it crinkled the corners of her eyes. “Javi Mendez. I thought that was you.” It took him three full seconds to place her: Lila, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one he’d thought was so sharp and funny at his wedding rehearsal dinner, the one he’d felt guilty for noticing for years after he’d said his vows. She wiped her hands on her stained denim apron, leaned a little further over the counter, and their fingers brushed when she handed him a free sample of a pork tamale, still steaming. The skin on her wrist was soft, calloused a little at the knuckle from rolling masa all day, and he felt a jolt go up his arm that had nothing to do with the cold.
He tried to talk himself into walking away. This was a bad idea, a line he’d never been supposed to cross, tied directly to the ex he’d spent a decade avoiding. But she waved off his quiet mention of his ex like it was a gnat, told him she’d left California three years prior after her own divorce, had been running the tamale truck for six months, and had never once agreed with her cousin about how she’d handled the split. He ended up leaning against the truck’s counter for 45 minutes, talking about the 1968 Winnebago he was restoring for a couple from Miami, the way Gus steals leftover sandwich bread off the workbench when he’s not looking, the time he’d crashed a camper into a fence on a test drive because a deer ran out in front of him. She laughed so hard at that story she snort-laughed, and he found himself leaning in a little closer, like he didn’t want anyone else to hear the sound.
When her lunch rush died down, she grabbed a soda from the cooler under the counter, hopped over the low wooden barrier around the truck, and sat down next to him on the splintered picnic table bench. Her knee brushed his when she leaned over to grab a napkin off the table, and he didn’t move away. She smelled like chili powder and cherry lip balm, and when she leaned in to tell him about how his ex had burned the toast on their wedding morning and tried to pass it off as “artisanal charred bread”, he found himself laughing so hard he snort-laughed too. She held his gaze when she said it, like she was testing him, waiting for him to shut down at the mention of his ex, and he didn’t. He hadn’t even thought about her, not once, since he’d walked up to Lila’s truck.
She admitted she’d had her eye on a beat up 1972 Airstream listed an hour outside town, wanted to turn it into a mobile pop-up stand for farmers markets and wedding events, but she knew nothing about fixing up campers. He offered to come look at it with her, no charge, before she put in an offer. She tilted her head, that same sharp little grin on her face, and asked if he was sure he wanted to spend that much time around someone who shared DNA with his ex. He told her he didn’t care about that, not anymore.
The sun was starting to dip below the tree line when she stood up to get back to work, and she reached out to tuck a stray maple leaf that had gotten caught in his graying hair behind his ear. Her thumb brushed his cheekbone for half a second, warm and soft, and neither of them pulled away. He admitted he’d had a stupid, guilty crush on her since the rehearsal dinner, that he’d avoided every family event for the first three years of his marriage just so he wouldn’t have to be around her and feel like he was doing something wrong. She laughed, quiet, and said she’d known, that she’d spent the entire wedding weekend stealing glances at him too, had felt just as guilty about it.
She handed him a paper bag with a dozen extra pork tamales, said she remembered from old family stories he loved them, and slipped a handwritten note with her phone number and the address of the Airstream listing into the bag. They made plans to meet at his shop at 10 a.m. the next Saturday, to drive out and look at it together. He unlocked his pickup, tossed the tamales on the passenger seat next to his half-empty cider, and grinned so wide his cheeks ached before he turned the key in the ignition.
