Moe Rainer is 52, makes his living restoring vintage campers and travel trailers out of a cinder-block barn 10 miles outside of Marion, North Carolina. He’s got a scar slicing across his left eyebrow from a 2019 accident with a rusted awning spring, and his worst flaw is that he’s spent the seven years since his divorce actively dodging any interaction that could lead to something more than a quick wave over a fence. He figures small towns run on gossip, and he’s already been the subject of enough of it after his ex-wife left him for the deacon of their old church, so he keeps his head down, fixes folks’ lawnmowers for free when they can’t pay, and shows up to the general store’s weekly Thursday beer pop-up alone, every single week.
The humidity is thick enough to sip mid-July when she slides onto the bench across from him, the only open spot left at the only picnic table not occupied by a group of high schoolers yelling about their summer lifeguard shifts. Moe tenses immediately. He recognizes her: Lila, the new Methodist pastor who moved to town three months prior, who’d stopped by his shop the week before asking if he could fix the church’s beat-up 1972 VW bus they used for weekend food runs to the low-income hollows up in the mountains. He’d brushed her off then, mumbled something about being booked three months out, ignored the way she’d smiled and said she’d check back.