Manny Ruiz, 67, spent 32 years as an air traffic controller out of PDX, trained himself to make every call by the book, never deviate, never make waves. That habit stuck long after he retired, long after his wife Maria died of ovarian cancer eight years prior. He stuck to the same Saturday routine: 7am golf with the guys from the country club, 10am trip to the downtown farmers market for peaches and sourdough, home by 11 to watch the NASCAR race with a beer on the porch. He never argued with the guys when they ran their mouths about Lena Voss, the woman who’d moved into the house two doors down six months prior, who’d left Ron, their longtime golf partner, after 22 years of marriage. They called her a gold digger, a cold bitch, said she’d thrown away a good life for no reason. Manny just nodded, sipped his beer, never asked for details.
The air that Saturday was thick with clover and cut grass, sweat prickling the back of his neck under his faded Oregon Ducks cap. He’d just grabbed his usual bag of peaches from the old Mennonite couple’s stand when he spotted Lena at the far end of the market, behind a table draped in burlap stacked with glass jars of jam, handwritten labels scrawled in blue marker. He’d only waved at her twice, once when she was moving in, once when she was dragging a dead tree branch to the curb. She looked up and caught him staring, grinned, waved him over. He hesitated for half a second, glanced over his shoulder to make sure none of the golf guys were hanging around, then walked over.
The table smelled like ripe strawberries and bourbon, a little wicker basket of sample crackers sitting next to a jar of seedless raspberry. “Tried the new strawberry lemon zest yet?” she asked, picking up a cracker, smearing a thick dollop of jam on it with a small wooden knife. When she held it out to him, their fingertips brushed. He felt the rough callus on her index finger, from tightening canning lids, he guessed, and the faint coolness of the silver ring shaped like a raven on her middle finger. He took the cracker, bit into it, the sweet tart taste bursting across his tongue, better than any jam he’d ever bought at the grocery store. He noticed a smudge of purple jam on her left cheek, just below her eye, and her nails were chipped pale lavender, a thin white scar wrapping around her wrist, like she’d fallen off a bike as a kid.
“Fixed the split in the fence between our properties earlier this week,” she said, leaning against the edge of the table, her shoulder brushing his when a group of teens squeezed past the narrow aisle between stands. She didn’t move away. “Rotten board had been there for months, kept letting my neighbor’s cat get into my herb garden. You probably didn’t even notice.” He hadn’t. He’d walked past that fence twice a day for months, his head stuck in a golf newsletter or a podcast about old airplanes, too checked out to see anything that didn’t fit his routine. He felt a sharp twist of guilt, then a flicker of something warmer, sharper, when she held his gaze for three beats longer than polite, no trace of the cold bitch the guys ranted about anywhere on her face.
He asked her why she left Ron, before he could stop himself. She laughed, not bitter, just amused, wiping a stray strand of gray-streaked brown hair off her forehead. “He was cheating on me with a 28 year old waitress from the club snack bar,” she said, like she was talking about a bad round of golf. “Didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t want to make him look bad in front of all his buddies. Figured they’d make up a worse story about me anyway. Was I right?” He nodded, felt his face heat up, ashamed of all the times he’d sat there and let the guys talk shit about her, too much of a coward to ask for the truth.
She glanced at the clock on the wall of the coffee shop behind her, then looked back at him, her eyes bright. “Canned a batch of peach bourbon jam last night, still warm enough to eat straight off the spoon if you want to come over later. No pressure. I know your friends would lose their minds if they saw you stepping foot in my house.”
He hesitated, for a full ten seconds, thinking about the guys ribbing him at golf next week, the snide comments, the possibility they’d kick him out of the league he’d been part of for 12 years. Then he thought about the last eight years, the same routine every single day, no surprises, no one to talk to that didn’t want to complain about greens fees or gas prices. “Yeah,” he said, before he could overthink it. “I’ll bring the peaches I just bought. We can make something with them.”
He left the market, his paper bag of peaches crinkling in his hand, and stopped at the wild blackberry bush at the edge of his driveway on the walk home, stuffing a handful of the plump, dark berries into his pocket to bring her, even though he knew his fingers would be stained purple for the rest of the day.
