Rafe Mendoza is 53, a vintage snowmobile restorer based out of a cinder block shop outside Bemidji, Minnesota, and his biggest flaw is that he’s spent the last 8 years treating any potential interruption to his routine like a blown engine on a 1970s Arctic Cat: something to be fixed immediately, or avoided entirely. When his ex-wife moved to Florida to run a beachside souvenir stand and told him he could either sell the shop or stay alone, he chose alone, threw himself into sourcing parts at swap meets and rebuilding sleds for wealthy clients who shipped them in from across the Upper Midwest. For 8 years, the only voices he heard regularly were the guy who ran the local parts counter and the occasional customer dropping off a rusted hulk. He’d noticed Clara, the 49-year-old mobile equine vet who’d bought the run-down farm 2 miles down the road from him three months prior, of course he had. He’d just gone out of his way to avoid her, taking the 10-mile back route to the hardware store instead of the 2-mile stretch past her driveway, ignoring the half-wave she’d given him when he’d driven by once with a sled strapped to his trailer. He told himself he didn’t have time for new neighbors, for small talk, for anything that would pull him out of the quiet, predictable bubble he’d built.
He fumbled for an excuse, mumbled something about being busy with work, and she laughed, loud and unselfconscious, the kind of laugh that made a couple walking by glance over. “I saw the sleds in your shed last week when my border collie got loose and ran onto your property,” she said, and when she touched his forearm to get his attention as a kid on a scooter darted between them, he felt the weight of her fingers through the worn thin cotton of his flannel shirt, his face heating up so fast he was sure she could see it. “Left a jar of wild blackberry jam on your back porch as a thank you for not yelling at her for digging up your flower bed. Figured you’d find it eventually.” He winced, because he hadn’t checked his back porch in three days, too focused on finishing a rebuild for a client from Minneapolis. That was the thing about the bubble he’d built, he realized: it kept out the small, nice things too, not just the hassle of small talk. Part of him wanted to make an excuse, say he had to get back to the shop, that he had parts to sort, that he didn’t have time to stand around talking. Part of him was disgusted with how much he’d let his own fear of being hurt again turn him into a hermit who avoided his neighbors and forgot to check his porch for jam. The other part of him, the part he’d buried 8 years prior, wanted to stay, wanted to hear more about how she’d raced snowmobiles as a teen up in Ontario, wanted to ask her if she wanted to test drive one of the restored sleds come winter.
They walked side by side down the sidewalk, their shoulders brushing every few steps, neither of them moving away. She twisted her lemonade cup in her hand, condensation dripping down her wrist, and he twisted the carburetor in his, the rusted metal digging into his palm. When they reached the bar, he held the door open for her. She paused in the doorway, turning to look up at him, the neon sign from the window painting her cheeks pink. “Glad you finally stopped avoiding me,” she said. He held up the carburetor, the rusted edges glinting in the light. “Turns out even old, beat up parts work okay with something new sometimes,” he said. She laughed, tapped the side of the carburetor with one finger, and stepped inside ahead of him, the faint scent of lavender and horse lingering in the space she’d just occupied.
