Manny Ruiz is 53, makes his living restoring vintage travel trailers out of a cinder block barn 12 miles outside Bend, Oregon, and hasn’t willingly attended a local social event in eight years. His cousin, who sits on the Rotary board, all but frogmarched him to the summer beer garden fundraiser, saying he’d spent too much time alone with his hound dog and half-finished Airstream projects, and Manny caved only because he was promised no one would corner him to ask about his ex-wife, who’d left him for a commercial real estate broker in Portland back in 2015. He’s leaning against the trunk of a gnarled oak at the edge of the park, condensation from his cold IPA dripping down his wrist into the cuff of his grease-stained flannel, already mentally mapping the fastest route back to his property, when he spots her behind the silent auction table.
When he reaches the table, he stretches for the bid sheet at the same time she does. His knuckles brush the ink smudge on her wrist, and he freezes for half a second—her skin is warm, she smells like lavender and lemon Pledge, the kind of scent that hits him right in the chest like a memory he didn’t know he had. She doesn’t pull away, just grins and nods at the book. “My great uncle owned that. Spent 32 years patrolling Crater Lake, wrote all those notes in the margins about where he camped, which trails had the best huckleberries.” Her voice is low, a little rough, like she spends half her day talking over rowdy kids at story time. He finds out ten minutes later that’s exactly what she does: she’s the new head librarian, moved to town three months prior from Seattle, hates the rain but loves that she can see the mountains from the library’s back porch.