Rafe Ortiz, 54, has been building custom saddles out of his cinder block shop on the edge of Fredericksburg for 22 years. His knuckles are crisscrossed with thin scars from awl slips and horse bites, his left shoulder aches when humidity climbs over 60 percent, and he’s turned down three separate setups from friends in the last year alone, convinced small town dating is just an excuse for half the county to gossip over breakfast tacos at the diner. He lost his wife to an Austin commercial real estate broker eight years back, and his best friend Joe died two years later when a spooked steer kicked him in the chest, so he’s gotten used to keeping to himself, talking more to his old hound dog than most people he meets.
He’s wiping sawdust and leather dye off his dark jeans after accepting third place in the annual livestock show saddle competition when he turns too fast, sloshing half his Shiner Bock down the front of a woman’s cream linen button down. He starts to apologize, fumbling for a napkin in his back pocket, when she laughs, loud and warm, and he recognizes her immediately: Lila, Joe’s only daughter, home for the first time since her divorce finalized six months prior. He’d seen her graduation photos, watched her walk down the aisle to marry that smug corporate lawyer back in 2017, but he hasn’t stood this close to her since she was 17, begging him and Joe to let her drive the old pickup down to the creek.
She waves off his apologies, says the shirt was thrifted anyway, and asks if he’s got 10 minutes to sit, she’s been meaning to track him down for a favor. They find a dented picnic table tucked between two oak trees, far enough from the main beer garden crowd that no one’s paying them any mind, and she sits so close their knees brush under the slatted wood every time one of them shifts. He can smell coconut sunscreen on her skin, mixed with the faint smoky tang of the barbecue pits set up near the auction barn, and every time she leans in to ask a question, her shoulder presses against his bicep, warm through the thin cotton of his work shirt. She holds his eye contact longer than feels strictly polite, and he catches her glancing at his hands more than once, at the calluses thick across his palms, the tiny silver scar on his index finger he got the day he and Joe tried to break a wild mustang when they were 23.
She tells him she found her dad’s old roping saddle in the back of her grandma’s garage, cracked along the stirrup leathers, the tooled oak leaf design faded almost to nothing, and she wants him to restore it. He’s halfway to saying yes before she finishes talking, even though he’s got a three month wait list for custom work, even though the voice in the back of his head is yelling that this is a bad idea, that she’s Joe’s kid, that everyone in town will talk if they see her hanging around his shop after hours. The voice gets quieter when she laughs at his dumb joke about the time Joe tried to grill a whole turkey on a campfire and burned it so bad the crows wouldn’t touch it, when she admits she still has the tiny leather keychain he carved for her when she was 12, shaped like a horse head.
She reaches across the table to brush a fleck of leather dye off his cheek, her fingers soft against his jaw, lingering for a beat longer than necessary. She tells him she had a crush on him when she was 16, used to make up excuses to stop by his shop when her dad was working with him, and he chokes on his beer, heat creeping up the back of his neck. He admits he’d stared at the photo she posted on Facebook a month prior, of her riding her chestnut mare through the hill country, for 20 minutes straight, felt like a dirty old man for even thinking about her that way, and she snorts, says he’s not that old, and she’s been thinking about him too.
They finish their drinks as the sun dips low below the oak trees, painting the sky pink and orange, and he walks her to her beat up Ford pickup parked at the edge of the fairgrounds. She pauses with her hand on the door handle, leans in, and kisses him quick, soft, her lips tasting like peach hard seltzer and mint gum, before she pulls back, grinning. She tells him she’ll bring the saddle by his shop at 10 the next morning, and warns him she’s bringing carnitas breakfast tacos, the ones he likes, because she remembers how he skips breakfast when he’s swamped with work.
He stands there in the gravel parking lot long after her taillights have disappeared around the bend, the last of his beer warm and flat in his hand, the faint ghost of her kiss still tingling on his mouth. He’s already running through ideas for the restore, thinking he can add a tiny, hidden tooled cherry next to the oak leaves, a nod to the snow cones he used to buy her after fishing trips when she was a kid. He unlocks his own truck, calls his hound dog off the bed where he’s been napping, and laughs when the dog drops a half chewed tennis ball in his lap.
