Rico Marquez, 53, spends most days on his back under rusted vintage travel trailer chassis, grease crusted under his fingernails so deep it takes three scrubs with pumice soap to fade, let alone disappear. He’s run his restoration shop out of a converted hay barn 10 miles outside Moab for 12 years, and his biggest personality flaw is that he’ll go three weeks without speaking to another human if his old high school buddy, now the local fire chief, doesn’t show up at his door with beer and a complaint about his department’s outdated rescue rig. He’s avoided every small town community event since his wife left him seven years prior, too tired of the sideways glances and well-meaning but invasive questions about how he’s holding up. He only agreed to come to the fire department’s summer cookout fundraiser because the chief called in a favor—Rico owed him for pulling his half-restored 1958 Shasta Airflyte out of a flash flood ditch the previous spring.
He’s propped against the side of the beer cooler, holding a frosty IPA he pulled two minutes prior, when her sandal brushes the scuffed toe of his work boot. He looks up, ready to mumble an apology, and freezes. It’s Clara Mendez, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one he hadn’t seen since the divorce papers were signed. She’s 48 now, sun streaks threading through her dark wavy hair, laugh lines fanning out from the corners of her warm brown eyes, and she smells like coconut sunscreen and the mesquite smoke curling off the brisket pit 20 feet away. She’s holding a paper plate stacked high with sliced brisket and potato salad, and she grins like she’s been looking for him.
“Still hiding in corners to avoid small talk, huh?” she says, leaning in so he can hear her over the chatter of the crowd and the country song playing over the portable speaker. Her shoulder presses against his bicep through his faded Carhartt work shirt, and he can feel the warmth of her skin through the thin cotton. He snorts, surprised into a real smile, the kind he rarely lets show around people he doesn’t work for. He’d forgotten how easy she was to talk to, back when he was married, how she’d hang around his shop when she was home from college, asking questions about the trailers he was fixing up, never treating him like he was just the quiet guy her cousin had married.
They talk for 40 minutes, standing so close their elbows brush every time one of them lifts their drink or takes a bite of food. She tells him she moved back to Moab three months prior to take over her mom’s veterinary clinic, that she’s been wanting to buy a vintage travel trailer to take on solo camping trips up into the La Sal Mountains on her days off. He’s halfway through offering to show her the three finished units he has on his lot behind the barn before he catches himself, half convinced he’s crossing a line. She’s his ex’s cousin, for Christ’s sake. People will talk. The last thing he wants is the small town rumor mill churning out garbage about him chasing after his ex’s family. But then she tilts her head, her eyes glinting in the golden hour light, and says she’d love that, only if he brings a six pack of that IPA he’s drinking and stays to watch the sunset with her after.
The gravel crunches under their work boots as they walk the half mile from the cookout field to his lot, the noise of the crowd fading behind them, replaced by the buzz of sagebrush cicadas and the distant lowing of a cow on the adjacent ranch. He flips on the string lights strung along the side of the barn when they get there, and she oohs out loud when she sees the polished aluminum of the 1962 Airstream he finished two weeks prior, the one he’d been planning to keep for himself. He opens the door for her, and she steps inside, running her hand along the polished walnut cabinetry he’d spent three months refinishing by hand. She sits on the built-in velvet bench by the open door, and he hands her a cold beer, the can sweating so much it leaves a ring on the oak side table when she sets it down.
She turns to him then, so close their knees are touching, and tells him she’s had a crush on him since she was 19, that she’d asked the chief a week prior if he’d be at the cookout, that she’d driven 20 minutes into town specifically to see him. He freezes for half a second, the old, familiar urge to run, to make an excuse, to shut down and go back to his quiet, empty barn, rising up in his chest. But then she reaches out, brushes a fleck of brisket rub off the front of his shirt, her fingers grazing his chest through the fabric, and he can’t remember the last time anyone looked at him like he was something worth showing up for.
He leans in, slow, giving her time to pull away if she wants, but she doesn’t. She tilts her chin up, and their lips meet, soft at first, then deeper, the faint taste of barbecue sauce and IPA on her tongue. One of his hands comes up to cup her jaw, the grease under his fingernails still faint, and she leans into his touch like she doesn’t care at all. The sun dips below the red rock horizon outside the trailer door, painting the sky bright orange and lavender, and the string lights flicker softly above them.
They pull back a minute later, both grinning like idiots, and she takes a sip of her beer, her foot brushing his under the bench. She says she’s free next weekend if he wants to take the Airstream out for a test run up to the campsite she likes by Warner Lake, that she’ll bring the marshmallows for s’mores if he brings his cast iron skillet for morning pancakes. He nods, already mentally making a list of things to pack, the quiet dread he’s carried in his chest for seven years feeling lighter than it has in longer than he can remember. He walks her to her truck 10 minutes later, and she leans in to kiss him one more time before she climbs in the driver’s seat. He watches her pull out of the driveway, her hand waving out the open window as she turns onto the main road, and for the first time in as long as he can remember, he doesn’t feel like rushing back to the quiet of his empty barn.
