Elias Voss, 57, blinked hard against the burn of ghost pepper chili, swiping the back of his grease-stained red flannel across his watering eyes. He’d come to the small town fall cookoff only to drop off the restored 1962 Airstream reading lamp he’d donated to the raffle, planned to be back in his workshop sanding trailer paneling before the sun dipped below the San Francisco Peaks. The air reeked of hickory smoke, cumin, and the faint sour tang of warm beer, peanut shells crunching under his scuffed work boots as he leaned against the beverage table, twisting the cap off a root beer.
He didn’t notice her step up beside him until her shoulder brushed his, light enough that he almost wrote it off as a gust of wind carrying wood smoke. Marisol Reyes had moved into the old adobe three miles down his dirt road six months prior, and they’d only ever exchanged half-wave nods when they passed each other in their pickups, he in his beat-up 1998 Ford F-150, she in a forest green 2002 Tacoma caked in red desert dirt. She was Jake Cantrell’s ex-wife, and Jake was his only regular source for vintage aluminum trim, the kind he needed for the high-end trailer restorations his wealthy out-of-state clients paid top dollar for. Jake had showed up to his shop drunk last spring, yelling about how Marisol had left him for “no good reason” and that anyone who so much as looked at her would answer to him.
Elias had written Jake off as a petty, bitter loser that night, but he’d still avoided crossing paths with Marisol on purpose, not wanting the headache of Jake’s drama. Now she was standing six inches away, holding a paper plate stacked high with cornbread, sun lines fanning out from the corners of her dark eyes when she laughed at his red, tear-streaked face. “You picked the fire department’s batch, didn’t you?” she said, nodding at the empty paper chili bowl crumpled in his other hand. “Those guys think heat equals flavor. I keep a pack of tums in my truck just for the cookoff.”
Her voice was low, rough from years of working as a Grand Canyon park ranger, yelling over wind and tourist crowds. She leaned in a little when he told her he restored vintage travel trailers for a living, her elbow brushing his bicep as she gestured to a beat-up 1971 Scotty Sportsman keychain hanging from her jeans loop. “I just bought one of those,” she said, her face lighting up. “Sitting in my side yard right now, roof leaks so bad the previous owner used a kiddie pool to catch the rain inside. I’ve been trying to find someone who knows what they’re doing to look at it, but every handyman in town avoids me like I’m contagious.”
Elias’s jaw tightened. He knew exactly why. Jake had been running his mouth at the only bar in town for months, telling anyone who would listen that he’d “take care of” anyone who helped his ex. When they both reached for the same stack of paper napkins on the table, their hands brushed, her skin calloused and warm, a thin white scar slicing across her knuckle. He felt a jolt go up his arm, the kind he hadn’t felt since before his divorce eight years prior, when he’d stopped bothering to even look at women, convinced he was too set in his ways to deal with anything messier than a rusted trailer frame.
He thought about Jake’s loud, empty threats, about the 200 bucks Jake still owed him for a trailer axle he’d sourced last summer, about the frozen meatloaf dinner waiting for him in his workshop fridge that he’d been eating every other night for two weeks. He thought about the way she was looking at him, no pity, no awkward small town politeness, just a quiet, playful curiosity that made his chest feel tight. “I can come look at it tomorrow,” he said, before he could talk himself out of it.
Her grin widened, and she fished a park service branded ballpoint pen out of her hoodie pocket, scribbling her address on a napkin dotted with cornbread crumbs. She tucked it into the breast pocket of his flannel, her fingers brushing his chest through the thin fabric, the contact so light he almost wondered if he imagined it. “I’ll make green chile enchiladas,” she said. “No ghost peppers, I promise.”
He stayed for another hour, sitting next to her on a hay bale by the fire pit, listening to her tell stories about chasing stray burros off the South Rim, about the time a tourist tried to ride a mule down the Bright Angel Trail in flip flops. When he got in his truck to leave, he patted the napkin in his pocket, feeling the crinkle of the paper under his palm, and detoured to the feed store on the way home to grab a tube of butyl rubber sealant he knew she’d need for the Scotty’s leaky roof.
