Ray Voss, 58, retired power lineman out of Lima, Ohio, had skipped every town chili cookoff for seven years straight. The last one he’d gone to was the week his wife, Cheryl, announced she was leaving him for a 32-year-old real estate agent who drove a Tesla and wore boat shoes without socks. His only consistent personality flaw, if you asked his best friend Earl, was that he held grudges like he held the heavy-gauge wire he’d strung for 32 years: tight, no give, no chance of slipping loose. Earl dragged him to this year’s cookoff anyway, saying he was wasting his retirement sitting in his garage drinking PBR and stripping rust off a 1972 F150 that’d been up on blocks for two years.
Ray showed up in his faded gray work flannel, sleeves rolled up to show the scar snaking up his right forearm from a 2018 line fire, plastic cup of cheap beer sweating in his grip. He steered clear of Cheryl’s booth, where she was passing out bowls of her bland tomato-heavy chili and flirting with that same Tesla-driving schmuck, until he caught a whiff of smoked chipotle and burnt end chili sharp enough to cut through the smell of grilled corn and mosquito spray. He followed the scent to a booth at the far end of the square, strung with hand-painted metal stars, and found Jolene Marlow leaning against the folding table, silver streaks cutting through her dark wavy hair, a smudge of welding grease on her left forearm, cutoff denim shirt open over a faded Black Sabbath tee.
He tensed up first, instinct kicking in from 20 years of Cheryl ranting that Jolene, her younger sister’s kid, was “bad news, a wild thing who’d never settle down, nothing but trouble for anyone dumb enough to get close to her.” He’d bought it back then, had avoided family functions she was at, even though he vaguely remembered fixing her busted BMX bike when she was 16, after she’d crashed it trying to jump a ditch by the old power substation. She spotted him before he could turn away, waved him over, grinning so the little scar on her left jaw crinkled at the edge.
“Ray Voss. I’d know that forearm scar anywhere,” she said, holding out a small sample cup of chili. Their fingers brushed when he took it, the calluses on her palm rough as his, worn smooth from decades of working with metal. He took a bite, the heat of the chipotle spreading slow across his tongue, better than any chili he’d had in 10 years. She leaned in to talk over the roar of a group of kids chasing a golden retriever past the booth, her shoulder brushing his, breath smelling like cinnamon and tequila. “I made it with the brisket you smoked for the fire department fundraiser last fall. Grabbed a pound off you when you were loading up your truck. Remember?”
He did, vaguely, had been half asleep that morning, hadn’t paid attention to who was buying. He kept waiting for that old disgusted twinge, the voice in his head that sounded like Cheryl telling him to walk away, but it didn’t come. All he could focus on was the way she tilted her head when he talked, the way she laughed at his dumb joke about the time he’d dropped a wrench on Cheryl’s prized rose bushes, the way she didn’t flinch when his hand accidentally brushed hers again when he passed back the empty sample cup. She told him she’d moved back to town three months prior to take care of her dad, who was recovering from a stroke, had set up a welding shop three blocks off Main, was working on a public sculpture for the town park.
“You wanna come see it?” she asked, nodding toward the end of the square, where the streetlights were just flicking on. He hesitated for half a second, glancing over at Cheryl’s booth, where she was glaring daggers at the two of them. For a second he almost said no, almost stuck to the grudge he’d carried for years, almost followed the rules Cheryl had laid down for him decades earlier. Then he looked back at Jolene, her dark eyes bright in the fading summer light, and nodded.
The shop smelled like welding fumes, cedar, and lemon Pledge, the roll-up door cracked open to let in the cool evening air. She flipped on a string of fairy lights strung above the workbench, and he saw the sculpture immediately: a life-sized metal lineman, climbing a steel pole, a tiny scar etched into its right forearm. “I made it for you,” she said, soft, stepping closer so their shoes were almost touching. “Cheryl always talked shit about you, but I remembered you. You were the only adult who didn’t treat me like a problem when my parents split up. You even gave me that old pocket knife of yours, remember? I still have it.”
Ray felt his chest tighten, all that old resentment he’d carried for both Cheryl and the version of Jolene he’d been told to hate melting away faster than snow on a hot transformer. He reached out, his thumb brushing the grease smudge on her forearm, and she didn’t pull away. She tilted her chin up, their eyes locking, and when he leaned in to kiss her, she met him halfway, the kiss slow, tasting like chipotle and tequila and something like relief, no rush, no pressure, no rules to follow.
They sat on an old oak work stool an hour later, passing a cold can of beer back and forth, watching the sun dip below the horizon, painting the metal shavings scattered across the concrete floor streaks of pink and tangerine. She told him about driving cross country with a welding rig in the back of her pickup, he told her about the F150 he was restoring, how he planned to drive it up to the Upper Peninsula to go fishing next fall. When he laced his calloused fingers through hers, she squeezed back, no need for fancy words, no need to overthink it. A stray moth fluttered past the fairy lights, landing on the arm of the metal lineman sculpture, and Ray smiled, for the first time in years without feeling like he was hiding something.
