Javi Ruiz, 62, spent 38 years as a state wildlife biologist focused exclusively on desert tortoise conservation before he retired three years prior. His biggest flaw, per his only remaining close friend, was that he’d turned stubborn reclusiveness into a competitive sport in the seven years since his wife passed from ovarian cancer. He’d turned down dinner invitations, hunting trips, even a volunteer spot on the local conservation board, all because he claimed he’d rather spend his days hiking the remote canyons outside town alone, no small talk required.
He only showed up to the annual May community fish fry because his next door neighbor had left a plate of homemade tamales on his porch the week before and he owed her a favor. He’d parked himself in the shade next to the industrial beer cooler, nursing a lukewarm Coors Light and pretending to scroll through old tortoise survey photos on his phone so no one would bother him, when someone slammed into his left arm hard enough to make him slosh beer down the front of his faded flannel.
The woman who’d run into him was holding a paper plate heaped with fried catfish and coleslaw in one hand and a sweating glass of pink lemonade in the other, and a dollop of coleslaw had landed directly on the toe of his scuffed work boot. She was 58, he later learned, named Clara, the new county librarian who’d moved to town from Portland three months prior after her divorce had finalized. She didn’t step back immediately when she looked up at him to apologize, her wire-rimmed glasses smudged with grill smoke, their elbows brushing as she fumbled in her jeans pocket for a napkin. He smelled lavender shampoo on her hair, mixed with the cedar smoke curling off the cook grills and the sharp, sweet scent of the mesquite trees lining the park edge.
He was annoyed at first, ready to grumble that he was fine and she should watch where she was going, until he saw the calluses on her fingertips as she wiped the coleslaw off his boot, the faint scar across her wrist from a climbing fall, the small tortoise enamel pin stuck to the lapel of her denim jacket. “You’re the guy who did all the tortoise surveys around here, right?” she said, nodding at the half-hidden 2019 Desert Tortoise Count t-shirt peeking out under his flannel. “I’ve been finding burrows on my hikes west of the red cliffs, I’ve been trying to figure out who to report them to.”
Javi’s first instinct was to brush her off, tell her to email the county wildlife office, that he didn’t do that work anymore. Instead he found himself leaning against the cooler, asking her which canyons she’d been hiking, pointing out the difference between tortoise burrows and badger holes on the photos in his phone. She teased him for drinking cheap beer when the church ladies were selling homemade horchata 10 feet away. He teased her for bringing lemonade to a fish fry where 90% of the attendees drank nothing stronger than craft IPA or sweet tea. The space between them stayed small, their shoulders bumping every time someone walked past, her knee brushing his when she leaned in to get a better look at a photo of a baby tortoise he’d found the week before.
He spent the next two hours arguing with himself about whether to invite her to hike the remote canyon he went to every Sunday morning, the spot he’d only ever brought his wife to before. He felt sick to his stomach at the thought, like he was breaking a promise he’d never actually made, like he was betraying the quiet routine he’d built to keep himself from grieving too hard. But when she mentioned she’d been trying to get access to that exact canyon for months because she’d heard there was a cluster of unrecorded burrows there, the words came out before he could stop them: “I go there every Sunday at 6 a.m. You can tag along if you don’t mind walking fast and stopping every 10 minutes so I can check on the burrows I already know about.”
She showed up at his driveway at 5:45 the next morning, carrying a backpack stuffed with trail mix and two mason jars of iced peach tea, wearing steel-toe hiking boots and a wide-brimmed hat. The hike was quiet at first, Javi tensing every time she stepped too close, half convinced he’d made a terrible mistake. By the time they reached the first cluster of burrows an hour in, though, he was rambling about the tortoise nesting patterns he’d tracked for 20 years, pointing out the scratch marks on the rock faces that showed where tortoises had climbed to get shade in the summer. They found a new burrow half hidden under a palo verde tree 2 miles in, the entrance marked with fresh tortoise tracks, and Clara whooped so loud a pair of quail flew out of the brush nearby.
They sat on a flat sandstone rock after that, passing the iced tea back and forth, when Javi felt a sharp prickle on his left wrist. He looked down and saw a tiny cholla cactus spine stuck in his skin, and before he could reach for it, Clara had leaned in, her fingers brushing his wrist as she plucked it out. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t pull away. For the first time in seven years, he didn’t feel guilty for enjoying the company of someone who wasn’t his wife. She smiled at him, wiping a smudge of dirt off her cheek, and asked him if he wanted to stop for breakfast burritos at the little diner off the highway on the drive back.
He nodded, already thinking about the extra tortoise tracking forms he had in his desk at home, the ones he’d thought he’d never use again.
