Elias Voss, 62, has restored 17 vintage travel trailers in the eight years since his wife died. He’s got a scar running the length of his left forearm from a 2021 aluminum cutting mishap, and a bad habit of prioritizing small town gossip’s unwritten rules over his own wants, to the point he’s turned down three separate dinner invites from widows at his church just to avoid the whispered speculations at the grocery store the next week. He’s only at the fire department summer BBQ because he donated a handcrafted Adirondack chair he built from reclaimed cedar to the silent auction, and the chief guilted him into showing up to collect the check once bidding closed.
He’s leaning against a splintered pine picnic table nursing a lukewarm Pabst, half listening to a guy from the feed store rant about hay prices, when he spots her. He almost doesn’t recognize her at first—last time he saw Lila, she was 19, loading a U-Haul to move to Portland for art school, crying because her cat had peed on her favorite hoodie. Now she’s 38, wearing cutoffs frayed at the hem and a faded 1977 Fleetwood Mac tour tee, sun gilding the streaks of auburn in her dark hair, laughing so hard at a dumb joke the fire chief tells her she snorts a little. Her eyes lock with his across the gravel lot, and her grin softens. She grabs a paper plate stacked with pickled okra and a brownie, and cuts through the crowd of kids chasing each other with water guns straight to him.
She stops close enough that he can smell coconut sunscreen and the sharp, briny tang of the okra on her plate, over the background smell of charcoal smoke and grilled hamburger grease. “Elias,” she says, and her voice is deeper than he remembers, warm as bourbon. “I heard you still build stuff. I bought that little birdhouse you left at the farmers market last month, the one with the sunflower carved into the side.” He blinks, fumbles his beer a little, and her knuckles brush his wrist when she reaches out to steady the bottle before it sloshes. The contact sends a jolt up his arm, and he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned, glancing over his shoulder to make sure none of his wife’s cousins are watching. The last thing he needs is someone running their mouth about him talking to his late wife’s niece, no blood relation or not.
She doesn’t take the hint, just sits down on the bench next to him, her knee brushing his through the thin denim of his work jeans. She tells him she moved back to town two months prior, opened a small plant shop on Main Street, got sick of Portland rent and rude customers and missing the way the sky turns pink over the mountains at sunset. He tries to keep the conversation light, stiff, asks about her mom, mentions he heard her brother got married last year, but she keeps leaning in, keeps asking about his trailer restorations, keeps laughing at his dumb dry jokes like they’re the funniest thing she’s ever heard. Every time her arm brushes his, every time she holds eye contact a beat longer than is strictly polite, he fights the urge to pull away, to make an excuse and leave. Half of him is disgusted with himself for even noticing how soft her lips look when she bites them to hold back a laugh, for feeling the heat of her thigh against his like a brand. The other half of him is hungry, starved for the kind of easy attention he hasn’t had since his wife got sick.
The silent auction closes at 7, his chair sells for $420 to a retired teacher from the elementary school, and Lila offers to help him carry the empty wooden crate he brought the chair in back to his shop, the detached garage behind his house he works out of. He hesitates, then says yes. The sun is dipping below the treeline by the time they walk the three blocks to his place, crickets chirping loud in the grass along the sidewalk, no one else out on the street. When he fumbles the garage door key in the lock, she laughs, puts her hand over his to guide the key into the slot, and this time he doesn’t pull away.
The door rolls up, the smell of sawdust and paint thinner hits them, and before he can turn on the light, she steps close, wraps her arms around his neck, and kisses him. He freezes for half a second, his brain screaming about what the neighbors would say, what his wife’s family would think, how everyone in town would call him a creep, call her a homewrecker. Then she tangles her fingers in the gray hair at the nape of his neck, and he forgets all of it. His hands land on her hips, he can feel the warmth of her skin through the thin cotton of her tee, and he kisses her back, slow, like he’s got all the time in the world.
They order pepperoni pizza from the place downtown an hour later, carry it out to the porch of the shop, sit on an old lawn chair sharing a can of iced tea. Fireflies blink on and off in the oak tree at the edge of his yard, and no cars drive past, no one stops to stare. When she rests her head on his shoulder, he wraps his arm around her waist, pulls her a little closer, and doesn’t glance over his shoulder to check if anyone’s watching.
