Leo Marquez, 62, spent most days alone in his workshop outside Boise, restoring vintage Airstreams for clients scattered across the Pacific Northwest. Seven years after his wife’s sudden death from a stroke, his only consistent company was his border collie Mabel and the classic country cassettes he played loud enough to drown out the silence. His biggest flaw, if you asked his old fire crew buddies, was that he’d turned avoiding casual human connection into a competitive sport. He skipped every town event, turned down every dinner invitation, and even took to hiding in his workshop when the church ladies dropped off casseroles after a local wildfire last summer.
He only showed up to the rural fire department’s summer beer garden fundraiser because his best friend Ray threatened to drop a load of rusted Airstream scrap in his driveway if he bailed again. He was already counting down the minutes until he could leave, leaning against a splintered pine picnic table, condensation from his cold IPA dripping onto the scuffed leather of his work boots, when he spotted her.
Elara Voss, 58, had moved into the run-down ranch at the end of his dirt road three months prior, fresh off a divorce from a corporate lawyer in Portland, here to raise rescue goats and sell artisanal goat cheese at the Boise farmers’ market. They’d spent the last two months actively avoiding each other, ever since Leo had hiked down to the shared creek on their property line to cool off after a 12 hour work day and walked right in on her skinny dipping, sun glinting off the tattoos curling up her ribcage, both of them frozen for three long seconds before he’d spun around and tripped over a root on his way back up the path. He’d driven an extra 12 minutes to the grocery store across town ever since, just to avoid running into her at the local market, convinced she thought he was a perverted old widower with no respect for boundaries.
She stepped around a group of kids chasing each other with melting snow cones, and her elbow brushed the bare skin of his forearm, warm and calloused, when she stopped three feet away. She was wearing a faded Pearl Jam tee, cutoff denim shorts, and work boots caked with the same red mud that streaked his own, a flannel tied loose around her waist. She didn’t step back after the accidental touch, just held his gaze, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a smirk that made his chest feel tight. “You gonna keep pretending you don’t see me, Marquez?”
He fumbled with his beer can for half a second, heat creeping up the back of his neck. The smell of grilled bratwurst and pine hung thick in the air, the local country band off to the side playing a slow cover of a Johnny Cash song he’d danced to with his wife at their wedding. He’d replayed that creek moment a hundred times in his head, half disgusted with himself for not checking the area first, half unable to shake the image of her laughing as he’d tripped over that root, yelling after him that it was fine, he didn’t have to run. “Thought you’d be avoiding me,” he said, finally, and she laughed, loud and bright, and leaned in a little closer, their shoulders almost touching now.
“Avoiding you? I’ve been walking my goats down your road twice a day hoping you’d come out and say hello. You’re the one who drives past me like I’m a patch of poison ivy.” She held out a small paper cup of goat cheese, dusted with dill, and his fingers brushed hers when he took it. The cheese was tangy, sharp, a little herbaceous, and he nodded, impressed. She sat down on the picnic table bench, and when he sat next to her, their knees bumped under the table, neither of them moving away.
They talked for an hour, first teasing each other about the creek incident, her admitting she’d purposely not told any of the local gossipers because she didn’t feel like fielding questions about the sharp, quiet widower who’d seen her naked, him admitting he’d hidden from her when she’d dropped off a jar of goat cheese on his porch two weeks prior. He told her about the 1971 Airstream he was restoring for his granddaughter’s high school graduation gift, she told him about the blind goat she’d rescued last month that kept escaping into his pasture to eat his wild blackberries. The sun dipped low, painting the sky pink and tangerine, and she leaned her head back to laugh at a story he told about tripping over that same creek root twice as a kid, and he noticed the freckles across her nose, the silver streaks woven into her dark hair, the way her thumb brushed the corner of her mouth when she was thinking.
She stood up, brushing crumbs off her shorts, and held out her hand to him. “I’m having a bonfire at my place tonight. Just me, the goats, and a bad 90s western playing on a projector strung between the pines. You can bring that hazy IPA you keep stocked in the back of your truck, I saw it when you were fixing the fence line last week.”
For half a second, every instinct he’d honed over seven years of hiding screamed at him to say no, to go home to his empty house and his half-restored Airstream and his cassettes, to avoid the mess of getting close to someone again. Then he looked at her hand, calloused from mending fence posts and hauling hay, the small tattoo of a goat on her wrist, and he took it, his palm rough against hers.
He left the fundraiser 20 minutes later, stopping at his house to grab the six pack of IPA and a bag of s’mores supplies he’d stashed for his granddaughter’s upcoming visit, Mabel curled up in the passenger seat of his beat up Ford truck. He pulled down the dirt road to her ranch 10 minutes later, and she was standing on the porch holding a lantern, three goats milling around her feet, the faint glow of the projector screen glowing behind her. She waved when she saw his truck, and he stepped out, gravel crunching under his boots, meeting her halfway up the drive. She reached out to take the s’mores bag from him, and their fingers tangled for a beat, neither of them pulling away.
