Rafe Delgado, 59, makes custom hand-forged knives out of a cinder block garage behind his single-wide outside Seguin, Texas. His only flaw, if you ask the few people who know him well enough to ask, is that he holds grudges longer than he holds a sharpening stone to a blade edge. Twelve years prior, he’d applied for a small business loan to expand his shop, asked his then-wife’s cousin Lena to co-sign, and when he got denied, he’d blamed her outright, never stopping to ask for context before cutting her out of his life entirely. He’d not spoken to her since, not even when he ran into her at his ex-wife’s funeral three years prior. So when he showed up to the annual Guadalupe County Fall Festival to set up his booth, he nearly turned right back around when he saw her setup directly next to his, stacked high with mason jars of pickled okra, blackberry jam, and peach habanero preserves.
The air smelled like fried funnel cake and burnt mesquite from the barbecue tent down the row, pecan shells crunching under his work boots as he hauled his display case of hunting and kitchen knives to the table. He avoided eye contact for the first three hours, even when he heard her laughing with customers, the sound warm and throaty, familiar in a way that made the back of his neck heat up. He was wiping down a damascus steel chef’s knife when he heard a clatter to his left, looked up just in time to catch a jar of peach habanero jam before it hit the ground. Their hands brushed as she reached for it at the same time, her palm calloused from twisting jar lids and cold from digging through the cooler under her table, his rough from hours of sanding osage orange handle blanks. The jolt of that contact traveled up his arm so fast he nearly dropped the jar anyway.
“Thanks,” she said, and he looked up to meet her eyes for the first time in over a decade. She’d dyed her hair a deep auburn since he’d last seen her, streaks of gray at the temples, laugh lines fanning out from the corners of her hazel eyes, a smudge of purple jam on the side of her thumb. He’d forgotten how tall she was, nearly eye level with him even in her scuffed white sneakers, her flannel shirt open over a faded Willie Nelson tee, denim jeans cuffed at the ankle. He grunted a response, handed her the jar, and turned back to his display, his heart hammering so hard he could hear it over the George Strait cover band playing off by the carnival rides.
She brought him a sample of the jam an hour later, on a saltine cracker, held it out across the narrow gap between their tables. “For saving the jar,” she said, and he hesitated before taking it, the cracker crumbing a little between his fingers. The jam was sweet at first, then bright, burning heat from the habanero lingered on his tongue long after he’d swallowed. “Told you I’d get the recipe right,” she said, and he remembered her testing batches of the stuff at his ex-wife’s cookouts back when they were all still on speaking terms, everyone complaining it was too spicy to eat. He laughed, a rough, rusty sound he hadn’t heard come out of his own mouth in months.
They talked through the lull in customers after the lunch rush, her leaning against the edge of his table, him sitting on the folding chair behind his display, their knees brushing every time one of them shifted. She told him her husband had died of a heart attack 18 months prior, she’d sold their house in Austin and moved back to Seguin to be closer to her mom, had started the jam business to keep herself busy when the quiet of the empty house got too loud. When he brought up the old loan, she frowned, shook her head, told him she’d never even gotten the paperwork for it, that his ex had told her he’d changed his mind about expanding, had pocketed the down payment he’d given her to pass along. The tight, hot anger he’d carried for 12 years dissolved so fast he felt lightheaded, embarrassed he’d wasted so much time being mad at the wrong person.
By the time the festival closed down at 8, it was drizzling, the air turning cool, the pavement still warm enough that the rain steamed when it hit. He helped her pack up her heavy coolers, the two of them hauling the stacked jars to her beat-up Ford F150, standing under the truck’s retracted awning to stay out of the rain when they were done. She had a smudge of peach jam on her lower lip, he noticed, the scent of her lavender perfume mixing with the sharp tang of pickled okra and wet asphalt. He reached out before he could think better of it, wiped the jam off with the pad of his thumb, and she didn’t pull away, her eyes locked on his, her hand coming up to rest on his forearm, her fingers warm through the thin fabric of his work shirt.
The kiss was slow, unhurried, no urgency, like they both knew they had plenty of time to make up for. When they pulled apart, she laughed, reached into the cooler behind her, handed him a full jar of the peach habanero jam, the label hand-drawn with a little stick figure of a knife in the corner. “For the road,” she said, and they exchanged numbers, agreed to meet for breakfast at the diner downtown the next morning, the one with the chicken fried steak he’d been eating every Saturday for 20 years. He watched her pull out of the parking lot, her taillights fading into the rain, before he turned back to his own truck. He tucked the jar into the passenger seat of his own truck, turned the key, and grinned so wide his cheeks ached, for the first time in years not dreading the drive home.
