Elias Voss, 57, makes his living stripping rust off 1960s travel trailers and reupholstering their dinettes to smell like leather and cedar instead of mildew and regret. He hasn’t set foot in his small eastern Oregon town’s annual summer barbecue and car show since his wife left him for a commercial real estate broker in 2015, mostly because he hates the way half the crowd looks at him like he’s a sad project to fix up and the other half looks at him like fresh meat for their single sisters. He only showed up this year because his fully restored 1962 Airstream Overlander won best in show, and the prize was a $500 gift card to the hardware store he’s frequented for 30 years.
He’s leaning against the side of a beat-up Ford F-150, paper plate loaded with brisket so fatty the grease is seeping through the cardboard, sweating through the shoulder of his faded Carhartt shirt, when he catches a whiff of lavender and lemon hand soap over the hickory smoke and cheap beer. He turns, and Marnie Hale is standing 18 inches away, close enough that he can see the faint smattering of freckles across her nose he’d forgotten about, holding a can of hard seltzer, grinning like she knows exactly how off guard she’s caught him.
Marnie is his ex-wife’s second cousin. He’d only met her a handful of times when he was married, mostly at holiday dinners where she’d sit in the corner and make fun of his ex’s terrible stuffing while the rest of the family bickered about politics. He’d had a stupid, unmentionable crush on her back then, the kind he’d beaten down with guilt every time it popped up, because you don’t look at your wife’s family like that, no matter how much smarter and funnier they are than the woman you married. He hadn’t seen her in 11 years, not since the last family Christmas before his ex left. He blinks, and for a second he’s so flustered he drops his plastic fork on the grass.
His first instinct is to make an excuse and leave. The old guilt bubbles up fast, sharp and ugly, like he’s doing something wrong just standing next to her, like his ex is going to pop out from behind the cotton candy stand and start yelling. But then she tilts her head, and her eyes drag down to the calluses on his hands, the ones he gets from sanding aluminum frames for 10 hours a day, and she says she heard he still fixes up trailers, that she’s been looking for someone to renovate the little 1972 Scamp she bought when she moved back to town three months ago to run the Main Street coffee shop.
He doesn’t remember hearing she moved back. He doesn’t get out much, spends most of his time in his workshop on the edge of town, listening to old Miles Davis records and sanding until his arms ache. He nods, and says he can take a look at it, if she wants. They wander over to the gnarled oak tree at the edge of the fairgrounds, away from the crowd, and sit on the splintered wooden picnic table bench. When she sits down, her knee presses against his, denim on denim, and she doesn’t move it. He doesn’t either.
They talk for 40 minutes. She tells him she got divorced three years ago, that her ex was a corporate lawyer who cared more about his golf handicap than he did about her, that she left Seattle because she was sick of the rain and the traffic and the people who acted like your job was the only interesting thing about you. He tells her about the Airstream, about how he’d fixed it up for him and his ex to travel the country after they retired, how he’d almost sold it when she left, but then he realized he liked working on it more than he liked the idea of traveling with her.
She leans in when he talks, her elbow resting on the table between them, so close he can smell the mint on her breath when she laughs at his story about the time he accidentally glued his hand to a trailer countertop. The guilt fades slow, replaced by a warm, tight feeling in his chest he hasn’t felt in 10 years, the kind that makes him feel like he’s 20 again, nervous to ask a girl out for milkshakes after a football game. He keeps waiting for the voice in his head to tell him this is wrong, that everyone in town will talk, that he’s betraying a marriage that ended almost a decade ago, but it doesn’t come. Not when she tucks a stray piece of oak leaf that blew into his hair behind his ear, her fingers brushing his temple soft as a feather, not when she says she always thought his ex was an idiot for leaving a guy who put that much care into everything he touched.
She says the ex hasn’t talked to her in four years, not after Marnie told her she was stupid for throwing away a good thing for a guy who wore custom tailored golf shirts and cheated on her with his secretary. The words hang in the air for a second, thick as the smoke from the barbecue pits, and Elias feels the last of the tension drain out of his shoulders. He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s allowed to want something that doesn’t come with guilt, for once.
She stands up, wipes a smudge of barbecue sauce off the side of her high-waisted jeans, and nods toward the edge of the fairgrounds, where his Airstream is parked by the creek, glinting silver in the late afternoon sun. She asks if he wants to show her the inside, says she’s curious what a perfect restoration looks like. He stands up too, his knees cracking a little when he does, and nods.
