Javi Mendez, 51, has made a living for the last 12 years restoring vintage campers out of his cinder block workshop on the edge of West Asheville, North Carolina. His biggest flaw, one he’ll admit to only when he’s three beers deep and alone, is that he’s spent the 8 years since his wife left him for a travel influencer walling himself off from any social interaction that isn’t strictly transactional. He avoids community events, turns down invitations to cookouts, keeps his conversations with customers limited to part costs and project timelines. He only shows up to the local fire department’s annual chili cookoff because his next door neighbor tapes a free entry ticket to his workshop door at 8 a.m., and his fridge is empty save for a jar of dill pickles and a half-eaten container of cottage cheese.
He’s leaning against a stack of beer cases by the beverage tent, paper plate loaded with beef chili spicier than he expected, grease crusted under his index and middle fingernails from fixing a 1968 Shasta Compact’s wiring that morning, when he spots her. Elara Hale, 47, the new part-time librarian who showed up at his shop three months prior asking about restoring the 1972 Airstream her late dad left her, and who he’d snapped at for no reason when she mentioned she was his ex-wife’s second cousin. He’d felt like an ass the second she walked out, but he was too stubborn to track her down and apologize.
She walks over before he can duck behind the portable cooler. Her work boots crunch on the gravel lot, she’s wearing a faded denim jacket and a band tee for a local bluegrass group, there’s a smudge of chili powder high on her left cheek, and she smells like pine hand soap and the cinnamon hard candy she always keeps in her jacket pocket, the kind he’d seen her pop into her mouth when she was flipping through his project portfolio back in June. She stops so close her elbow brushes his bicep when she leans in to yell over the band playing on the small stage at the center of the lot. “Thought you said you never came to these stupid community events,” she teases, holding his eye contact steady, no hint of lingering anger from their last interaction.
He stammers out a half-assed excuse about free beer, feels his ears go pink, and before he can stop himself, he’s reaching up to brush the chili powder off her cheek with his calloused thumb. The contact is soft, lasts two seconds too long, and he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned, a mumbled apology already on his tongue. She doesn’t flinch. She just grins, and her hand brushes his wrist when she lifts her own fingers to dab at the spot he’d touched, like she’s checking he got all of it. “Took you long enough to say you’re sorry for being a jerk,” she says, nodding at the empty picnic table on the far edge of the lot, away from the crowd of rowdy firefighters and local parents herding screaming kids.
They sit side by side through two more plastic cups of beer, talk about the Airstream, about the water damage she found under the kitchen sink the week prior, about the group of 12 year olds who keep trying to check out banned graphic novels from the library branch she runs. Their knees brush under the splintered picnic table every time one of them shifts, and he finds himself leaning in closer to hear her when the band picks up a faster, louder track, so close he can smell the citrus hops of the IPA on her breath, see the faint smattering of freckles across her nose he didn’t notice during her first visit to his shop.
He’s fighting a quiet war in his head the whole time, half of him disgusted that he’s even entertaining the idea of getting close to her, convinced it’s some kind of betrayal of the marriage he’d spent so long mourning, convinced he’s too old and too set in his grumpy, routine-focused ways to be any good for anyone. The other half of him buzzes like a live wire at the way she laughs at his terrible jokes about camper electrical wiring, the way she keeps letting her shoulder brush his when she leans in to talk, the way she remembers offhand that he prefers hazy IPAs over lagers, a detail he’d mentioned in passing three months prior.
When the sun dips below the treeline and most of the crowd has packed up their coolers and folding chairs to head home, she turns to him, her knee pressed solidly against his now, no pretense of it being an accident. “I’ve got that Airstream parked in my driveway,” she says, twisting the edge of her denim jacket between her fingers, just the smallest hint of shyness in her voice. “And I picked up a six pack of that hazy IPA you had in your shop fridge back in June. Wanna come take a look at the water damage tonight? No pressure if you don’t.”
He hesitates for half a second, thinks about the half-eaten cottage cheese waiting for him in his fridge, the stack of work orders on his workshop desk, the 8 years he’s spent hiding from anything that feels like it could break his heart again. Then he nods, stands up, offers her his hand to pull her up off the picnic bench.
She takes it, her palm soft against his calloused one, and they walk together across the gravel lot to her beat up 1998 Ford F150. He opens the passenger door for her, and when she leans past him to grab the folded up map of the Blue Ridge Parkway off the dashboard, her hair brushes his jaw, and he catches another whiff of that pine soap and cinnamon he already knows he’s not going to be able to stop thinking about.
