Rafe Marquez, 57, had avoided the weekly Hill Country volunteer fire department beer garden for three straight years, but the smell of oak-smoked brisket from his favorite food truck had dragged him out of his workshop on that humid July evening. He’d planned to grab a pound of sliced brisket and a six pack of Shiner Bock, hightail it back to his property, and spend the rest of the night sanding the aluminum paneling on the 1968 Aristocrat he was restoring for a couple from Austin. His left knee, wrecked in a construction fall when he was 22, had other plans.
He stumbled ten feet from the food truck, his boot catching on a pothole in the asphalt, and threw a hand out to steady himself against the nearest picnic table. His palm brushed the bare, sun-warmed forearm of the woman sitting at the end of the bench, and he flinched back like he’d touched a hot stove, mumbled an apology before he even looked at her. She was Lena, the woman who’d opened the used bookstore on Main Street two months prior, the one who’d left a stack of old Louis L’Amour paperbacks on his workshop doorstep the week before after a customer had mentioned he collected them.
She didn’t look annoyed. She tilted her beer bottle at the empty spot next to her, the condensation dripping down the glass onto the chipped red picnic table. “Sit. Your knee looks like it’s screaming at you, and I’ve got extra dill pickles no one’s touched.”
Rafe hesitated. He hated small talk, hated the way every person in this town asked him when he was “gonna get back out there” after his wife died. But his knee was throbbing so bad he could barely put weight on it, and the pickles did look good. He lowered himself onto the bench, careful not to brush her again, and set his brisket container on the table between them. The George Strait cover band playing by the fire truck was halfway through “Ocean Front Property”, the tinny speakers crackling just enough to make it sound like the old cassette tapes his wife used to play on road trips.
They talked about the books first, the L’Amour collection he’d been building since he was a kid, the rare first edition she’d found tucked in a box of cookbooks she’d bought at an estate sale. He told her about the vintage travel trailer restoration business he ran out of his barn, the way he spent three weeks tracking down a vintage icebox that matched the original specs for the Aristocrat, and she laughed when he complained about how entitled out-of-state clients got when their restoration ran a week over schedule. Their knees brushed under the table when he shifted to grab a pickle, and he tensed up for half a second before he realized he didn’t mind the contact.
He was halfway through a story about a client who’d wanted him to install a hot tub in a 14-foot 1959 Scamper when she reached across the table, her thumb brushing the corner of his jaw to wipe off a smudge of brisket rub. Her skin was soft, smelled like lavender and cedar, and he didn’t flinch away, didn’t make a joke about being a messy eater. He just sat there, staring at her, the hum of the band fading into the background for a second. For the first time in 8 years, he didn’t feel a twist of guilt in his chest at the fact that he was attracted to someone else.
She told him she’d bought a beat-up 1972 Airstream from a farm outside town, wanted to turn it into a pop-up bookstore for small towns that didn’t have their own. She’d been asking around for someone who knew how to fix old trailers, she said, and she’d pay him in all the first edition L’Amour she could find, plus a weekly brisket dinner from the food truck for as long as the restoration took. He almost said no, almost made up an excuse about being booked solid for the next year, the line he used to turn down extra work so he could stay alone in his workshop. But then she smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling, and he said yes before he could talk himself out of it.
By the time the band wrapped up their last set, the sun had gone down, and fireflies were blinking over the field next to the parking lot. His knee still ached, but not bad enough that he needed to lean on her when they walked to his truck, though she slipped her hand into the crook of his arm anyway when she stepped over a pothole. He unlocked the passenger door for her, the cool air from the truck’s AC drifting out to meet them, and she climbed in, setting her stack of books she’d brought with her on the dash. He got in the driver’s seat, turned the key, and the old truck’s radio flickered on, playing the same George Strait song he’d danced to with his wife at their wedding. He didn’t reach to turn it off. He glanced over at Lena, who was tapping her foot to the beat, and pulled out of the parking lot, heading for the farm where she’d stashed the Airstream.
