Manny Rocha, 51, makes his living restoring vintage travel trailers out of a cinder block shop behind his house in central Texas, and for 12 years he’s avoided anything that feels like a temporary high. When his ex-wife left him for a cruise ship steel drummer mid-Caribbean vacation, he’d decided fleeting pleasure wasn’t worth the ache that came after it, and he’d stuck to that rule religiously, turning down date offers from the regulars at his local BBQ joint, skipping the singles mixers the church ladies kept badgering him to attend.
She’s Lila, he learns, his next door neighbor Carol’s niece, in town for three days to help Carol recover from knee replacement surgery. She lives in Portland, designs label art for craft breweries, and she’s been staring at his Airstream for an hour, she admits, because she’s been fixing up a 1958 Scotty trailer to live in on weekends at her cabin outside the city. He invites her to look inside, and the space is tight, barely six feet wide, so their shoulders brush every time he leans to point out the custom teak countertops he sanded by hand, the vintage propane stove he tracked down at a junkyard in Amarillo. She smells like coconut sunscreen and baked peach, her laugh is low and rough around the edges, and when she asks him for tips on sealing old cabinetry to withstand Pacific Northwest rain, he finds himself talking for 45 minutes straight, more than he’s talked to anyone in months, even telling her about his ex-wife, about how restoring trailers felt like the only thing he could control that didn’t break his heart halfway through.
He’s fighting the voice in his head the whole time, the one that says this is stupid, she’s leaving in three days, dating a neighbor’s family member is messy, off-limits, that he’ll only end up regretting letting himself get attached even a little. But when the cookoff wraps up, most of the crowd gone, the band packing up their guitars and amps, they end up sitting on dented folding chairs under his Airstream’s striped awning, splitting the last of the peach cobbler and a second cold beer. The temperature’s dropped ten degrees, she shivers, and he hands her his extra work flannel, which smells like sawdust and brisket smoke, the sleeves bunching up around her wrists when she puts it on. She leans over to pass him a bite of cobbler on a plastic fork, and her lips brush his knuckle when he takes it.
He doesn’t overthink it, leans in and kisses her, soft at first, then firmer when she tangles her hand in the graying curls at the nape of his neck. When they pull apart, she tells him she’s been looking for someone to help her restore a 1968 Avion trailer she found on a hay farm outside Portland, that she’ll split the profit right down the middle if he wants to come out for a week next month. He says yes before the voice in his head can talk him out of it.
The next afternoon, he helps her carry a stack of grocery bags up Carol’s front porch, and she slips him her phone number scrawled on the back of a hazy IPA coaster, tucking it into the front pocket of his jeans before she leans in to kiss his scruffy cheek. He walks back to his beat-up Ford truck, pulls the coaster out of his pocket while he waits at the stoplight on Main Street, taps the scrawled digits once before opening the flight search app on his phone.
