Manny Ruiz, 53, makes his living restoring vintage camper vans out of a weathered red barn 12 miles outside Asheville, North Carolina. He’s lived alone since his wife left him for a real estate broker in Charlotte 8 years prior, and his biggest personality flaw is that he’d rather spend 10 hours sanding rust off a 1971 Dodge Travco than make 5 minutes of small talk with a neighbor. He only agreed to come to the local fire department’s annual chili cookoff because his 16-year-old niece, Lila, begged him—she’d spent three weeks testing chili recipes in his kitchen, and didn’t want to stand alone at her booth while her friends ran off with their dates.
The air reeks of cumin, burnt hot dog buns, and cheap beer. A local cover band slams through an off-key version of a 90s country hit in the parking lot corner, and kids dart between folding tables yelling so loud Manny’s head throbs. He’s already mentally cataloging the list of repairs he needs to finish on a client’s Westfalia the next morning, planning his escape 20 minutes out, when someone jostles the woman standing next to his niece’s booth, and her shoulder slams hard into his bicep.
She’s holding a paper bowl of chili half-spilled on her flannel cuff, and when she looks up to apologize, Manny recognizes her immediately: Clara Voss, 48, the new county librarian who moved to town three months prior. He’d only ever seen her through the library’s front window before, when he dropped off boxes of his late mother’s western novels, and he’d written her off as the quiet, cardigan-clad type everyone in town gossiped about, the one who kept to herself and banned graphic novels from the teen section (a rumor, he’d later find out, started by a disgruntled dad mad his kid checked out *Sandman* without permission). She smells like lavender and cedar, not the powdery old-lady perfume he expected, and her hazel eyes hold his gaze for three full beats longer than polite, no flustered look away, just a small, teasing smirk when she notices him staring at the chili stain on her sleeve.
“Sorry about that,” she says, wiping the back of her hand on her jeans. Her voice is lower than he expected, rougher around the edges, like she’s spent years yelling over noisy rooms. “Some guy’s kid decided to use the aisle as a race track.”
Manny shrugs, suddenly off his game, the quip he’d had ready dying on his tongue. He hasn’t talked to a woman who wasn’t his niece or a parts supplier in closer to two years, and he’s suddenly hyper-aware of the grease under his fingernails, the scar across his left cheek from a van door slamming into him when he was 39, the fact that he’s wearing the same work jacket he wore to pull a transmission out two days prior. He wants to leave, wants to bolt back to his quiet barn where no one expects him to make conversation, but he finds himself leaning against the booth table instead, asking her how she likes the chili.
They talk over the noise of the band, leaning in closer every time a group of firefighters yells about winning the cookoff prize. Her cardigan brushes his arm when she gestures to Lila’s booth, saying she’s already come back for a second bowl, and when they both reach for a stack of napkins at the same time, their fingers brush. Her skin is cool, calloused on the tips from turning thousands of book pages, and Manny feels a jolt shoot up his arm he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager sneaking into his girlfriend’s basement after curfew. He’s half-disgusted with himself for even noticing, for letting his mind wander where he’s convinced it doesn’t belong—she’s younger, she’s new in town, she doesn’t need the baggage of a guy who can barely go to a cookoff without having a mild panic attack.
But when she mentions she’s been saving up for a vintage camper to drive cross country when her son goes to college next year, and that she’s been staring at the 1972 Westfalia parked outside his barn for weeks, the words are out of his mouth before he can think twice. “I’m wrapping up work on that one for a client tomorrow. I can show it to you after this, if you want. See if that’s the model you’re looking for.”
She agrees immediately, no hesitation, no awkward pause. They leave the cookoff 15 minutes later, walking down the quiet side street where he parked his work truck next to the Westfalia. The sun is dipping low over the Blue Ridge Mountains, painting the sky pink and orange, and the air is cool enough that Manny can see his breath when he laughs at her story about the disgruntled dad who started the graphic novel rumor. He pops the side door on the Westfalia, and golden light floods the custom wood interior he sanded and finished himself, and she steps inside, running her hand over the countertop like she’s imagining herself there, driving down a highway in Arizona with the windows down.
When she steps back out, she’s closer to him than she was before, so close he can smell the cinnamon on her breath from the chili she ate. She brushes her hand against his wrist, deliberate this time, not an accident, and says she’s been asking around about him for months, wondering if he was as much of a hermit as everyone in town claimed.
Manny tells her he’s got a beat-up 1969 VW bus shell in the back of his barn that he’s been meaning to get rid of for a year, no engine, no interior, just a solid frame. He says he’ll give it to her for 60% below market value, if she lets him help her work on it on weekends.
She nods, leans in, and kisses him quick, soft, no pressure, and when she pulls back she’s grinning the same teasing smirk she had back at the cookoff. She says she’ll be at his barn at 9am Saturday, no excuses, and she’s bringing black coffee, just how he likes it—she asked Lila, she admits, when he wasn’t looking.
She walks to her beat-up Subaru parked a few spots down, waves when she turns the key in the ignition, and pulls out onto the main road. Manny stands there leaning against the Westfalia for five minutes, replaying the kiss in his head, when his phone buzzes in his jeans pocket. It’s a text from an unknown number: “If you wear those grease-stained coveralls Saturday I’m making you sand the entire floor of the bus by yourself. Don’t test me.”
He snorts, types back a one-word reply: “Fair.” He tucks his phone back into his jeans pocket, kicks a loose gravel stone across the pavement, and smiles so wide his scar pulls tight at the corner of his mouth.
