Dale Hutchins had spent thirty-one years measuring the rise and fall of the Platte River, first as a survey tech, then as the county’s water commissioner. At sixty-two, he knew every sandbar and culvert, but he did not know why he’d let his sister talk him into judging the pie contest at the Harvest Days fair. He stood behind a folding table in the Legion hall, a paper bib pinned to his flannel, feeling like a prize hog himself.
The hall smelled of burnt sugar and floor wax. Ceiling fans pushed warm air around without cooling it. Dale kept his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the door, calculating an exit.
Then Junie Vasquez set her pie down. She was fifty-eight, he guessed, with silver threading her dark braid and forearms dusted in flour. She ran the taqueria on Third Street, the one with the hand-painted sign and the line out the door by noon. She wore a green apron over a sundress, and when she leaned to center her pie on the tablecloth, her shoulder came within an inch of his chest. He smelled cinnamon and clean sweat.
“Judge Hutchins,” she said, not quite smiling. “I heard you’re a hard man to impress.”
“I heard you don’t enter contests.”
“First time for everything.” Her eyes held his a beat too long, dark and steady, and Dale felt his ears go hot.
The other judges were already working through the berry pies. Dale took his fork to Junie’s entry, a sweet potato pie with a lattice crust, and the first bite undid him. Nutmeg, a little cayenne, butter that had been treated with respect. He chewed slowly, buying time.
“Well?” she asked, arms crossed.
“You put pepper in this.”
Her chin lifted. “Problem?”
“No.” He set the fork down. “Problem is I can’t stop eating it.”
Something softened at the corners of her mouth. She reached across to straighten his bib, and her knuckles brushed his sternum through the flannel. “Then don’t stop.”
He didn’t. He gave her the blue ribbon, and the crowd clapped, and Dale Hutchins, a man who had not asked a woman for anything since his divorce in 2004, heard himself say he’d like the recipe.
Junie’s eyebrows went up. “Recipe’s a family secret.”
“Then I’ll have to come by the restaurant.”
“You’ll have to wait in line like everybody else.”
He did. Saturday noon, he stood in the sun with the retirees and the young families, and when he reached the counter she slid him a plate he hadn’t ordered, mole chicken with rice, and said, “On the house. For the ribbon.”
Their fingertips met on the plate. Neither pulled away. The counter’s edge pressed into his hip, and she smelled of lime and smoke, and Dale forgot every word of the small talk he’d rehearsed.
After that, he found reasons to walk past the taqueria after closing. She found reasons to be sweeping the sidewalk. They talked about water rights and her late husband and his daughter in Tucson, standing close enough that the evening breeze carried her voice along his jaw. Once she plucked a fleck of lint from his collar and let her hand rest at the base of his throat, reading his pulse with her thumb, and Dale discovered his heart was still in working order.
Then the county board proposed a new flood easement that would take a slice of Third Street, and Junie’s building sat square in the path. Dale knew the numbers before anyone else did. He sat at his kitchen table with the survey maps and felt the old, familiar disgust—the same sourness that had soured his marriage. He was the man with the maps. The man whose job was to take things away.
He told her at the counter, after the last customer left. She wiped the same clean spot on the griddle for a long time.
“So you came to warn me,” she said.
“I came because I’d rather you hear it from me.”
Junie turned. The fluorescent light made her look tired, and angry, and something else he couldn’t name. “You’re the water man. Fix it.”
“I can’t fix a board vote.”
“You can’t fix anything standing in my doorway looking like a kicked dog.” She untied her apron, and her voice dropped. “You want to help me, Dale? Then sit down. Eat something. Stop treating me like a problem you have to survey.”
He sat. She fed him posole and cold beer, and they didn’t talk about the easement at all. When she cleared the plates, her hip bumped his shoulder, deliberate, and she left her hand on the back of his neck a moment. The warmth of it traveled all the way down his spine.
The board meeting was packed. Farmers in caps, shop owners with folders, Junie in the front row with her braid pinned up and her hands folded. Dale stood at the podium and laid out the hydrology, the flood risk, the alternatives. Then he did something no commissioner had done in the county’s history: he recommended the easement follow the old rail bed instead, a longer route that protected the block and cost more. He read the numbers aloud. His voice didn’t shake, but his hands did.
The vote carried by one. Junie turned in her chair and looked at him, and the look went through him like a spring thaw.
She caught him in the parking lot after, under the sodium lights. “You sandbagged your own budget.”
“I did.”
“For my block?”
“For your block.” He cleared his throat. “And for the pie.”
Junie stepped close, close enough that he could count the silver in her braid, and pressed her palm flat against his chest, right over the heart she’d already read. “You’re a stubborn man, Dale Hutchins.”
“Thirty-one years of practice.”
She laughed, low and warm, and kissed his cheek, letting her lips linger near the corner of his mouth. “Come by Sunday. I’ll teach you the recipe.”
Dale drove home with the window down and the river on his left, running low and easy in its banks.
