Rafe Marquez, 53, a minor league scout for the Tennessee Smokies, has spent the last three weeks holed up in his Knoxville rental after 11 straight months on the road. He hates crowds, hates holiday fluff, but his 12-year-old niece begged him for a fancy candle for Christmas, so he dragged himself to the downtown Christmas market, hands stuffed in the pockets of his frayed baseball jacket, boots crunching over discarded candy cane wrappers and fallen pine needles. The air smells like fried oreos and spiced cider, a brass band off to the left is slurring through “Jingle Bell Rock”, and he’s already considering bailing and ordering a candle off Amazon when he spots the stall lined with frosted glass jars, scrawled handwritten labels stuck to each one.
He leans in, squinting at the label for a pine and balsam blend, when his right shoulder brushes someone warm. He steps back, mumbles an apology, and looks down to see a woman with chestnut hair streaked with silver, a smudge of cinnamon wax on her left wrist, reaching for the same jar he was reaching for. Their knuckles bump. She laughs, a low, throaty sound he remembers immediately, even after seven years. It’s Lila, his ex-wife’s cousin, the one who used to sneak him extra slices of pecan pie at Thanksgiving dinners, who sat with him for three hours in the hospital waiting room when his dad had his first heart attack, who his ex always accused of “flirting too hard” with him even when he was too exhausted from road trips to flirt with anyone.
His first instinct is to turn and run, hop in his truck and drive three hours to a random high school game just to avoid the awkwardness, the unspoken weight of the divorce, the fact that he’s always thought she was far kinder, far funnier, far more interested in his stories about raw 18-year-old pitchers with 95 mph fastballs than his ex ever was. He freezes instead, hands still halfway out to the candle, and she tilts her head, eyes crinkling at the corners, holding eye contact long enough that he can feel the back of his neck heating up. She says she didn’t know he was still in town, he says he only stays for the off-season, spends most of his time living out of his truck, and she snorts, says that tracks, he was always the type to run from anything that felt like staying put.
The guilt hits him sharp, then, because he knows this is a line he shouldn’t cross. She’s family, or was, once, and if his ex found out they were even talking she’d blast it all over her Facebook group for local PTA moms, call him a creep, call Lila a homewrecker, even though the marriage ended seven years ago, no cheating, no big fight, just his ex getting tired of him being gone 300 days a year, him getting tired of coming home to an empty house that smelled like her boyfriend’s cologne. He shifts his weight, his boot scuffing the wooden slat under the stall, and he can smell her perfume, vanilla and cedar, mixing with the candle scents, and he finds himself leaning in a little closer, not pulling away when her arm brushes his again as she restocks a row of cinnamon candles.
They talk for 20 minutes, no mention of the ex, no mention of the old family drama, just him telling her about the 17-year-old catcher he scouted in rural Alabama last month who can throw out a runner from his knees, her telling him about quitting her accounting job in Atlanta last year to make candles full time, how she works 12 hour days during the holiday season but it’s the first job she’s ever had that doesn’t make her want to scream into her pillow at night. She leans across the stall to hand him a free sample of a tobacco and vanilla candle, says it smells like the old baseball glove he used to carry around everywhere, and her hair falls in his face, soft, smells like coconut shampoo, and he brushes a strand behind her ear before he even thinks about it.
She doesn’t flinch. She just smiles, slow, and says she closes up the stall in an hour, if he wants to get a beer at the dive bar down the street, the one with the pool tables that used to be their favorite before he got married. He hesitates for half a second, the old urge to run kicking in, the voice in his head saying this is wrong, this is going to cause drama, you’re just going to leave in six weeks anyway. Then he looks at her, the wax smudge still on her wrist, the way she’s biting her lower lip like she’s nervous he’ll say no, and he nods.
He tucks the two candles he bought — the pine one for his niece, the tobacco vanilla one for himself — into the inner pocket of his jacket, the wax still warm from being near the space heater under her stall. He tells her he’ll grab a table, and she nods, waving as he turns to walk toward the bar. Halfway down the block, he glances over his shoulder, and she’s still watching him, one hand raised in a half-wave, the other wiping a new smudge of wax off her forearm, grinning so wide the dimples in her cheeks show.
