Manny Ruiz, 54, has restored 72 vintage travel trailers in the 12 years he’s run his shop outside New Braunfels, Texas, and he hasn’t so much as flirted with anyone since his wife died of breast cancer eight years prior. His biggest flaw, if you ask his 19-year-old part-time employee Javi, is that he’s stubborn as a pack mule about letting anyone new into his orbit, convinced any hint of joy outside the memory of his wife is some kind of betrayal. He only agreed to enter the town’s annual fall chili cookoff because Javi bet him a case of Shiner Bock he’d place top three, even if his brisket chili had more smoked paprika than the old timers preferred.
The cookoff lot reeked of cumin, hickory smoke, and spilled beer, a local country cover band plowing through a worn-out George Strait track off to the side, kids darting between picnic tables with glow sticks looped around their wrists. Manny was leaning against a splintered wooden table, hoodie pulled up against the crisp October wind, sipping a beer and pretending to listen to the county commissioner ramble about road repairs when Clara Carter stepped into his line of sight. He’d only ever spoken to her a handful of times, always when he picked up parts from her late husband Jim, who’d run the town’s only RV supply shop until he dropped dead of a heart attack two years prior. He’d always kept his distance, out of respect for both Jim and his own dead wife, but he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t noticed the streak of silver running through her dark hair, or the way her laugh carried across a crowded room.
She was carrying a plate of jalapeño cornbread, flannel tied around her waist, scuffed work boots inlaid with tiny turquoise stones Jim had bought her for their 20th anniversary. She reached past him to grab a stack of napkins off the table behind his shoulder, her hip brushing his hard enough to make his beer slosh a little over the rim of the can. “Sorry about that,” she said, grinning, and held his gaze for three full beats longer than casual politeness required. He could smell her perfume, sandalwood and bright citrus, not the powdery floral stuff he remembered her wearing at Jim’s Christmas parties, and his throat went dry.
They fell into conversation easier than he expected. She told him she’d been dropping boxes of Jim’s old specialty trailer parts off at his shop for the past month, leaving them by the front door because she knew he spent most of his days in the back welding or sanding aluminum. She’d inherited a 1972 Airstream Sovereign from her dad earlier that year, she said, and had been working up the nerve to ask him to teach her how to restore it, but kept chickening out because he always looked so focused, so unapproachable. Manny’s chest twisted, half guilt half sharp, unexpected desire—he’d spent so long locking himself away he hadn’t even noticed her stopping by, hadn’t even considered she might want something from him that wasn’t a favor for a dead friend.
When she sat down across from him, her knee brushed his under the table, and she didn’t move it. She passed him a piece of cornbread, still warm, her calloused fingers brushing his when he took it, and he noticed the tiny Jim Beam tattoo on her wrist he’d never seen before. “Jim used to tease me about liking you,” she said, so quiet he almost missed it over the band, and his entire body went still. She smiled, small and soft, like she knew exactly what he was thinking, that he was already kicking himself for even looking at her too long, like he was breaking some unspoken guy code. “Said if anything ever happened to him, you were the only man in town he’d trust not to be an idiot. Told me I should ask you out before some other widow snapped you up.”
The guilt that had been coiled in his chest for eight years loosened, just a little, then a lot. He reached across the table, brushed a stray strand of hair off her face, his knuckle grazing the soft skin of her cheek, and she leaned into the touch instead of pulling away. He told her about his wife, about how he’d thought he’d never want to spend time with anyone else ever again, and she nodded, like she got it, like she’d felt the same way after Jim died.
His chili took third place, the prize a crumpled 50 dollar bill and a gift card to the hardware store, and he slipped the cash to the seven-year-old selling lemonade by the entrance before they left. His old hound, Buster, was curled up in the back of his beat-up Ford F-150, thumping his tail so hard the whole truck shook when he saw Clara. She asked if he wanted to come back to her place, look over the sketches she’d drawn of the Airstream remodel, pour a couple glasses of the bourbon Jim had stashed in the back of their pantry. He nodded, opened the passenger door for her, and when she climbed in, her hand lingered on his forearm for a slow, deliberate beat before she sat down. He closed the door behind her, walked around to the driver’s side, and didn’t even bother turning on the radio on the drive over, too busy listening to her talk about the terracotta tile she wanted for the Airstream’s kitchen, the little cushioned window seat she wanted to build by the door.
