Manny Ruiz, 53, retired minor league baseball scout, had only showed up to the county fire department’s annual chili cook-off because his high school best friend, now the fire chief, had showed up on his porch at 8 a.m. with a six pack of his favorite IPA and refused to leave until Manny agreed. He’d brought Lila’s award-winning beef and black bean chili, the recipe scribbled on her stained index card, and spent the first 45 minutes planted against the side of a fire truck, avoiding eye contact with every neighbor who gave him that tight, pitying smile he hated. He’d holed up in his workshop for three years restoring his late dad’s 1972 F-150, only leaving for beer runs and hardware store runs, convinced any public appearance would turn into a group therapy session about how sorry everyone was he was alone.
The first he knew of her was the elbow that knocked the sweet tea out of his hand, half the cup soaking the front of his faded 1995 World Series Braves hoodie. He grunted, looked down, and found a woman with messy auburn hair tucked into a vintage Cubs cap, holding a handful of crumpled paper napkins and looking equal parts mortified and amused. “You are so not the first person I’ve spilled on today,” she said, leaning in to dab at the wet spot on his chest, her wrist brushing his sternum through the thin cotton. She smelled like vanilla and lemon furniture polish, the same scent Lila used to use when she restored the old hardcovers they picked up at garage sales. Her hazel eyes crinkled at the corners when she glanced up at him, no trace of that familiar pity on her face. She was Clara, the new county librarian, moved to town three months prior from Atlanta after a messy divorce, and she’d already voted for his chili, she said, because the handwritten note on his entry card admitting he still burned the onions half the time made her laugh harder than she had all week.
Manny’s first instinct was to mumble a thank you and make a beeline for his truck. He hadn’t held a real conversation with a woman who wasn’t the cashier at the grocery store in three years, and a sharp, guilty twist in his gut told him he had no business noticing how her worn Wranglers fit her hips, or how her laugh was low and rough, like she smoked too many cigarettes when she was alone. He didn’t want to be that guy, the widower who jumped at the first woman who was nice to him, didn’t want the whole town gossiping about him before the sun even went down. But she asked him about the scouting patch sewn to his jacket sleeve, and he found himself talking before he could stop himself—about scouting a kid from a tiny town in southern Alabama who’d made his major league debut the year prior, about driving 12 hours through a hurricane to watch a left-handed pitcher throw a perfect game in high school, about Lila teasing him for spending more time in his truck than he did in their house for the first 20 years of their marriage.
She didn’t cut him off, didn’t pat his arm awkwardly when he mentioned Lila, just nodded and asked follow up questions, sipping a can of hard seltzer and leaning against the truck beside him, their shoulders brushing every time someone walked past too close. When the emcee announced the chili winners over the crackling loudspeaker, Manny’s entry took second place, and Clara cheered so loud the group of firemen standing ten feet away turned to stare. She grabbed his bicep, squeezed hard, and leaned in so close her breath was warm on his ear, teasing him for saying he didn’t stand a chance against the church ladies who won every year. The guilt that had been coiled in his chest all afternoon loosened, just a little, and he smiled, a real one, not the tight, polite half-smile he’d been using since Lila died.
He asked her if she wanted to ditch the cook-off and get a beer at the dive bar down the road, the one with the jukebox that only played 90s country and peanut shells scattered all over the linoleum floor. She said yes before he even finished the question, grabbing her flannel jacket off the picnic table where she’d left it. He held the passenger door of his F-150 open for her, and she ran her hand across the newly reupholstered dash, grinning and saying her dad had the exact same truck when she was a kid, she’d spent every summer riding in the passenger seat going to fishing holes in the north Georgia mountains. He got in the driver’s seat, turned the key, and the old Merle Haggard song he’d been listening to on the drive over blared from the speakers. She tapped her boot to the beat, rolling the window down and letting the cool fall air blow her hair loose, and he pulled out of the parking lot without glancing in the rearview mirror at the crowd of people he’d spent three years avoiding.
