Elroy Mendez is 61, runs a vintage camera repair shop out of a cinder block building on the edge of Hendersonville, North Carolina, and hasn’t set foot at the annual fire department carnival in eight years. His flaw is a stubborn, almost performative reluctance to let anyone see him as anything other than the widowed guy who fixes light meters and avoids small talk—he skipped the carnival every year after his wife Lois died, even when his friends begged, convinced every neighbor was just waiting to match him up with the first single woman within a ten mile radius. He only showed up this year because his granddaughter Lila, 16 and sharp as a tack, threatened to hide all his rare 35mm lens filters if he didn’t help man the 4H cake walk booth.
The July air sticks to his forearms like plastic wrap, heavy with the smell of fried Oreos and diesel fumes from the rickety Ferris wheel. He’s counting out rolls of raffle tickets behind the folding table when she slides up next to him, holding two sweating cans of root beer, the aluminum crinkling in her grip. “Figured you’d be dying of heat over here,” she says, and he recognizes her immediately: Clara Bennett, 57, the new part-time librarian who moved to town six months prior, the one all the garden club ladies kept hinting he should ask out. He almost snubs the can, bristling at the thought of everyone watching, but his throat is dry enough to sand paper, so he takes it. Their fingers brush when he grabs the can, her skin cool from holding the drink, nails chipped with faded mint green polish, a thin white scar snaking up her left wrist from a childhood bike crash she mentioned once in passing at the library.
They’re crammed into the six foot space behind the table, so her hip brushes his every time she leans down to grab a cake off the lower shelf, and he can smell coconut sunscreen and old paper, the same scent that lingers in the back stacks of the library where he goes to borrow hardboiled mystery novels every other Tuesday. He catches her staring at the dented Pentax patch on his work shirt, and when he meets her eyes, she holds the gaze for three full beats, a half smirk playing on her mouth, before she turns away to hand a kid a sheet of cake walk numbers. His ears go pink, and he glares at the ground, angry at himself for reacting like a fumbling teen.
For an hour he’s stiff, grumbling about the noise, counting down the minutes until Lila comes back to relieve him, ready to bolt the second he can. Half the town walks past the booth, nudging each other, glancing over at him and Clara, and he feels that familiar hot twist of disgust in his gut—hates that people are reducing eight years of grief to a cheap sideshow match, hates that he’s even letting himself notice how her laugh carries over the calliope music, how she remembers every kid’s name who stops by the booth. He’s just about to make up an excuse about needing to check on his shop when she leans in, close enough that her hair brushes his ear, and says she found a 1962 Polaroid Land Camera in a box of donated books last week, can’t get the shutter to fire no matter what she tries.
He forgets all about leaving. He rambles for ten minutes about stuck shutters, dead light meters, the common flaws in that specific Polaroid model, and she listens, nodding, asking questions that aren’t just polite small talk, questions that tell him she actually knows her way around a film camera. They’re so wrapped up in the conversation that a 10 year old in a dinosaur t-shirt has to tap both their arms to get a raffle ticket, and they both laugh, loud and off guard, when they realize they’d let the line build up three people deep.
The garden club ladies walk past ten minutes later, whispering so loud they might as well be yelling, and Elroy’s jaw tightens, his good mood evaporating. He crosses his arms, leans away from Clara, goes quiet, ready to shut down again. But she doesn’t push it. She just grabs a plastic fork, stabs it into a leftover slice of chocolate cake, shoves half of it onto a napkin and shoves it at him. “They’re gonna talk no matter what we do,” she says, loud enough that the ladies glance over, flustered, and scurry away. “I’m not here because anyone told me to be. I’m here because you always have camera parts sticking out of your coat pockets when you return books, and I figured you’d be the only person in this town who doesn’t think a 60 year old Polaroid is just junk.”
She touches his forearm, light, just her fingertips, for half a second, and he doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t pull away. The disgust he’d been carrying around all night melts, slow, like butter on hot asphalt, and he realizes he’s been making himself miserable for eight years just to avoid what a bunch of bored retirees might say. He hasn’t felt that quiet, warm spark of interest in anyone since Lois died, and it doesn’t feel like a betrayal. It feels like breathing again.
The fireworks start right then, booming over the fairgrounds, painting the sky pink and blue and gold. The booth closes for the show, and everyone else drifts over to the open field to watch, but Clara stays, leaning against the table next to him, her shoulder pressed to his so he can hear her over the noise. He tells her to bring the Polaroid by his shop Wednesday afternoon, he’ll fix it for free, as long as she brings one of the peach turnovers she was selling at the baked goods table earlier that day. She grins, says she’ll bring two, and stays right where she is, their shoulders touching, as the last few firework bursts light up the dark. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out the crumpled pack of lemon drops he keeps for his granddaughter, and offers her one without looking away from the sky.
