Manny Ruiz, 53, owns a small-batch hot sauce operation out of a cinder block warehouse in east Austin, and he’d rather spend 12 hours stirring a vat of fermented habaneros than make small talk with strangers at the neighborhood farmers market. His only consistent personality flaw, if you ask his older sister, is that he’s hidden himself away from every possible casual connection since his wife left him for a cross-country truck driver seven years prior. He’d skipped the last three markets, but his part-time stock boy called out sick with strep, and he couldn’t afford to miss the foot traffic ahead of the holiday gifting rush.
The air still smelled like crisp oak and roasted pecans from the booth two spots down when he spotted her. Lila Marquez, 48, the city code inspector he’d been dodging for three months over a dumb, minor permit violation for the back porch he used to test new sauce batches. She stopped six inches from the edge of his folding table, sunglasses pushed up into the dark curls streaked with silver that she’d cut short last spring, and he froze mid-wipe of a smudge on a jar of his award-winning mango habanero blend.
He tensed up first, fully expecting her to pull a formal fine notice out of the canvas tote slung over her shoulder. She just smiled, the same lopsided grin he remembered from his ex-wife’s family cookout 10 years prior, when he’d burned an entire tray of burgers and doused them in his first experimental hot sauce to cover the char, and everyone at the party had pretended it was intentional. She reached across the table for a sample cracker slathered in his pineapple scorpion sauce, and their hands brushed when he passed her the plate. He felt the rough callus on her index finger, the one she’d gotten from 20 years of playing rhythm guitar in a cover band that played dive bars on the weekends, and a jolt ran up his arm that had nothing to do with capsaicin.
She was off duty, she said, had heard his sauce took first place at the state food fair last month, and wanted to try the new batches he’d been teasing on Instagram. He didn’t buy it at first, still half-convinced this was a weird sting operation, but she laughed at his dumb joke about how the city would have to pry his test porch out of his cold, dead, spice-stained hands, and he relaxed. She leaned in to point at the custom label he’d drawn for his limited-edition ghost pepper peach blend, her forearm brushing his bicep, and he could smell lavender lotion mixed with the pine wreath scent drifting from the holiday booth down the row. She held eye contact for two beats too long after she finished talking, like she was waiting for him to say something she couldn’t.
The tension hung thick enough to spread on a cracker. He’d thought about her more than he’d ever admit to anyone, in the quiet nights after he’d finished stirring vats and was drinking a beer on that very same back porch. It felt wrong, technically—she was his ex-wife’s first cousin, for Christ’s sake, and she could shut down half his operation with one form. But he hadn’t felt this spark, this dumb, giddy flutter in his chest, since the day his wife packed her bags.
She admitted it first, halfway through her third sample, that she’d been holding off on sending the formal fine for months. She didn’t want to mess up his business, she said, had always thought he was too good for her cousin, had had a dumb, quiet crush on him since that cookout a decade prior. He told her he’d had the paperwork for the permit filled out for two weeks, he’d just been too stubborn to drop it off at her office, too scared he’d say something stupid if he saw her.
The market crowd swirled around them, kids yelling about kettle corn, a bluegrass band tuning up at the far end of the lot, and neither of them noticed the three customers waiting at the booth for a full minute. He invited her over to the warehouse after the market closed, said he’d let her taste the experimental batch he was still tweaking, she could help him sign off on the permit paperwork if she wanted. She nodded, pulled a pen out of her tote, scrawled her cell number on the back of a sample slip, and tucked it into the pocket of his grease-stained flannel shirt, her thumb brushing the edge of the chest hair peeking out over the collar.
She waved once over her shoulder as she walked toward the pecan booth, and he stood there staring at the half-eaten sample cracker she’d left on his table, the heat of her touch still lingering on his wrist, already calculating how fast he could pack up his booth once the market ended in three hours.
