Javier Mendez, 53, makes his living restoring vintage travel trailers out of a cinder block and barn wood shop 20 minutes west of Austin, and he’s spent the last eight years avoiding anything resembling romance since his divorce. His biggest flaw? He’s a chronic people-pleaser, so terrified of letting someone down he’d rather skip the connection entirely than risk fumbling it. He’d volunteered to man the local Lions Club brat grill for the small hill town’s Fourth of July celebration mostly to get out of his sister’s annual pool party, where every distant relative would badger him about when he’d “finally settle down again.”
The July sun hung low enough to paint the oak trees pink when he first heard her laugh, cutting through the roar of the high school marching band and the chatter of kids chasing each other with water guns. He wiped sweat off his brow with the back of a grease-stained forearm, looked up, and froze. It was Lila, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one he’d only seen a handful of times at weddings and holidays before the split, the one he’d spent three days during a 2017 family camping trip deliberately avoiding because he couldn’t stop staring at the freckles across her nose. She leaned across the folding table stacked with paper plates and mustard packets, and he caught the soft scent of jasmine lotion over the acrid tang of charcoal smoke and burnt bratwurst. Her elbow brushed his when she reached for a napkin, and he fumbled the tongs he was holding, dropping a half-cooked sausage into the coals.