Elias “Eli” Marquez, 53, a minor league baseball scout who’d logged 120,000 miles on his beat-up Ford F-150 in the last year alone, showed up to the town fire department chili cook-off only because his 82 year old neighbor taped a free entry ticket to his front door with a note scrawled in sparkly purple marker: Stop moping. He’d avoided community events for six years, ever since his wife died of ovarian cancer, sick of the sad side glances and the generic “how are you holding up” questions that no one actually wanted a real answer to. He hung by the industrial beer cooler at the edge of the tent, beer can cold enough to make his scarred left knuckle ache, wearing the faded navy scout jacket he’d had since he got the job in 2014, scuffed work boots caked with infield dirt from the high school playoff game he’d driven 4 hours to see the day before.
A woman’s shoulder brushed his as she reached past him for a black cherry hard seltzer, the soft fabric of her plaid flannel brushing his bare forearm, and he caught a whiff of vanilla candle wax and old paper, the exact scent of the town’s only bookstore. He turned, and it was Lena Hart, 48, Joe Hart’s widow. Joe had been his high school catcher, died on a construction site three years prior, and Eli had avoided talking to her one on one ever since the funeral, too guilty for the stupid, unbidden crush he’d harbored on her since they were all 17, too convinced making a move would be some kind of betrayal. She grinned when she saw him, the same gap between her two front teeth she’d had back then, and nudged his boot with her own. “Figured I’d find you hiding over here. You write that column about the 1998 Dayton Dragons team last month? I read it three times. Joe used to talk about that season nonstop.”
Eli’s throat went dry. He wrote that 800 word column for the town paper every other week, never thought anyone other than old retired players actually read it. He nodded, fumbling with his beer can so hard a little sloshed over the edge onto his jeans. She laughed, wiping it off with the edge of her napkin, her fingers brushing his thigh for half a second, and he felt heat crawl up his neck, half shame, half something sharper, hungrier. He almost made an excuse to leave, told himself he was a terrible friend for even noticing how her jeans fit, how her hair had streaks of silver at the temples that glinted in the string lights strung across the tent. But before he could speak, she grabbed his wrist, her palm warm and calloused from stacking books all day, and tugged him toward a foldout table at the back of the tent. “My kid’s on the hayride with the firemen for another hour. Sit. I made the chili with extra habanero, just how you and Joe used to like it.”
He sat, and for the first 10 minutes he couldn’t stop scanning the crowd, waiting for someone to give him that judgmental look, waiting for the guilt to eat through him entirely. But Lena talked about the bookstore, about the kids who came in after school to borrow graphic novels, about how she’d started hosting fantasy football watch parties on Sundays for the single parents in town, and slowly the noise of the cook-off faded to a hum. She leaned in across the table to pass him a packet of oyster crackers, her knee brushing his under the table, and her voice dropped, soft enough only he could hear. “I know you think this is weird. I thought it was weird too, for months. But Joe would have kicked your ass for moping this long, you know that. We don’t have to be alone anymore if we don’t want to be.”
He stared at her, at the tiny smudge of chili on her lower lip, at the way her eyes crinkled when she was being honest, and the last of the resistance melted. He didn’t have to feel guilty for wanting to be seen, for wanting to touch someone who didn’t look at him like he was a broken thing to be pitied. He wiped the chili smudge off her lip with his thumb, and she didn’t pull away, just smiled, lacing her fingers through his on top of the table.
They left 20 minutes later, before the awards were handed out, Lena tucking her leftover chili container into her tote bag, the air crisp with the first hint of fall, leaves crunching under their boots as they walked the three blocks to her bookstore. She laced her hand through his halfway there, and he didn’t let go. He let her lead him up the creaky wooden steps to her apartment above the shop, the faint jingle of the store’s front door bell fading behind them.
