Manny Ruiz is 57, spent 31 years running pyrotechnics displays for air shows across the Gulf Coast before a misfired flash powder canister left a silvery, ropy scar snaking up his left forearm in 2021. He retired to a tiny clapboard house outside Seguin, Texas, keeps to himself, spends most nights tinkering with small firework batches in his detached shop, avoids the town’s endless social events like they’re duds that’ll blow up in his face. His biggest flaw: he’s spent 8 years convinced any attention from anyone is either pity for his accident or nosiness about why his wife left him for a crop duster pilot back in 2015, so he shuts every conversation down before it gets past “How’s the weather?”
He’s only at the annual volunteer fireman’s cookoff because his cousin dropped off a free brisket plate on his porch that morning and threatened to mow his 100-year-old oak tree down if he didn’t show up. He’s perched on the end of a splintered pine picnic table, half-drunk on his third Shiner Bock, staring at the scar on his forearm and trying to ignore the cluster of retired schoolteachers at the next table sneaking glances at him, when someone drops a paper plate heaped with pulled pork and pickled okra down on the table beside him.
He looks up. It’s Lila, the new mail carrier who’s been running his route for the past three months. She’s 38, recently separated from a lineman who moved to Oklahoma for work, wears cutoff denim shorts and scuffed work boots every day, has a constellation of tiny sun freckles across her nose that he’s only ever caught quick glimpses of when she handed him packages over his fence. She sits down so close her thigh brushes his jeans, and he can smell coconut sunscreen and hickory smoke clinging to her faded white tank top. He tenses up, ready to mumble a polite excuse to leave, when she holds his gaze for three full beats, no polite dart away, and nods at his forearm.
“That scar from the air show accident?” she says, picking up a pickled jalapeno off her plate and holding it out to him. Her fingers brush his when he takes it, calloused from hauling heavy mail bundles in 100-degree Texas heat, and he flinches first before he realizes he doesn’t want to pull away. He nods, chewing the jalapeno, the bright vinegar and capsaicin burning the back of his throat, waiting for the usual pitying follow up about how terrible that must have been, how sad it was he had to retire early.
It never comes. “I watch you out in your shop some nights when I’m finishing my route late,” she says, leaning back against the picnic table bench, her shoulder pressed to his bicep through his thin unbuttoned flannel shirt. “The sparks coming through the window? Look way cooler than the sad little bottle rocket displays the town sets off on Fourth of July. I’m fixing up the old drive-in out on Highway 123, wanted to ask if you’d run small pre-movie displays for the weekend showings. Nothing too big, just enough to make people feel like they’re getting something special for their 10 dollar ticket.”
Manny’s throat goes dry. He can see the schoolteachers at the next table craning their necks, definitely going to call every person in their phone book by sundown to gossip about the reclusive pyrotechnic guy hanging off the mail carrier’s arm. Part of him wants to stand up, walk out, go home to his quiet shop and avoid all the noise for the next week. That’s the part he’s listened to for 8 years, the part that hates being the center of small town gossip, the part that still stings when he remembers people whispering about his wife leaving him in the cereal aisle of the local H-E-B. But the other part of him, the part that hasn’t felt seen by anyone in years, is thrumming. She didn’t ask about his ex. She didn’t look at his scar like it was a tragedy. She asked about his work, like it mattered.
“People will talk,” he says, quiet enough only she can hear, and she laughs, a low, rough sound that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. She leans in so close her breath hits his ear, and he can taste the peach sweet tea she’s been drinking on the warm air between them. “Let ’em talk,” she says. “I’m tired of dating guys whose most interesting hobby is entering their lifted pickup in county fair truck shows. You make things light up. That’s way more fun.”
He sits there for another 10 seconds, listening to the crackle of the brisket grills 20 feet away, the sound of kids screaming as they chase each other with water guns, the distant hum of a diesel pickup driving down the main road. He thinks about going home alone, eating cold brisket in front of his 15-year-old TV, tinkering with fireworks no one will ever see. He thinks about the drive-in screen glowing at dusk, the sound of old John Wayne westerns playing over the crackling speakers, the sparks lighting up the faces of people there to have a good time. He nods.
They leave 10 minutes later, him carrying her half-eaten plate to the trash can, her holding his wrist for half a second to pull him away from a guy he went to high school with who tries to stop him to ask about the accident. He follows her beat-up Subaru out to the drive-in, the windows of his old F150 rolled down, the smell of cedar and wild bluebonnets blowing through the cab. When they park at the edge of the lot, she hops out, walks him past the old speaker posts half-buried in Johnson grass, points at the projection booth she’s been repainting bright cherry red. She stops to kick a loose chunk of asphalt out of her boot tread, and laces her fingers through his without asking, her hand warm and rough and perfect in his.
He squeezes her hand back, the scar on his forearm tingling where the summer wind catches it, and doesn’t let go when a car full of local teens honks as it passes on the highway nearby.
