Leo Marquez, 62, has run a custom leather saddle shop out of a converted cedar barn outside Fredericksburg, Texas, for 21 years. His knuckles are crisscrossed with tiny scars from awl slips, his left ear is half deaf from a shotgun misfire when he was 22, and he’s carried a grudge against his late wife Elena’s younger sister for 17 years, ever since she snapped at him at Elena’s funeral that he’d “let her die out in the middle of nowhere” instead of moving her to Houston for experimental treatment. He hasn’t spoken to Marnie since that day, so when she walks through the VFW hall’s screen door at the weekly Thursday fish fry, he nearly chokes on his bite of hushpuppy.
The hall smells like fried catfish grease, cheap light beer, lemon Pledge, and the faint, sweet tang of bluebonnets drifting in through the open windows. Marnie’s hair is streaked with more silver than he remembers, cut short in a messy bob, and she still has that thin pale scar above her left eyebrow from the 2004 Guadalupe River tubing trip, when she face-planted into a limestone rock after Leo dared her to jump off a 10-foot ledge. She spots him immediately, pauses with her hand still on the door handle, then walks straight to his table, pulling out the folding chair across from him before he can think of an excuse to leave. She sits close enough that he can smell lavender hand cream and the faint ghost of a menthol cigarette she snuck in the parking lot, her knee brushing his under the table by accident. He flinches like he’s been shocked.
They make stilted small talk first. She says she retired from 30 years as a travel nurse three months prior, moved to Fredericksburg to care for her and Elena’s 84-year-old mom, who’s in an assisted living facility 10 minutes outside town, deep in vascular dementia that only lets her hold onto memories from before 2010. She keeps asking about Leo and Elena, Marnie says, staring at the chipped Formica tabletop, twisting a silver ring on her index finger that used to be Elena’s. Leo’s jaw tightens, and he says the thing he’s been holding onto for 17 years, blunt as a hammer: I never forgot what you said at the funeral. Marnie flinches, then lifts her eyes to his, no anger, just tiredness. I was grieving, she says. I didn’t mean it. I drove out every other weekend the last nine months of Elena’s life. I saw you build that hospital bed addition onto the house, saw you sleep on the couch next to her every night, saw you make her strawberry smoothies even when she couldn’t keep them down. I was mad the world was taking her, and I took it out on you.
The noise of the domino game at the next table fades into a low hum. He stares at her, and he realizes he’s never seen her look so soft, so unguarded. She passes him the bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce across the table, and their fingers brush when he takes it. His skin prickles, a jolt he hasn’t felt since he first kissed Elena behind the high school gym in 1979. Marnie holds eye contact for three beats too long, her cheeks flushing pink, and she looks away first, wiping a crumb of catfish breading off her jeans. He offers to bring the old family photo album Elena kept, the one stuffed with polaroids of tubing trips, Christmas dinners, the first saddle he ever made, when she goes to visit her mom the next day. It might jog something good, he says. She nods, smiling, and that dimple pops in her left cheek, the one she and Elena shared, but it sits different on Marnie, less sharp, warmer.
He shows up at her rental cottage the next morning at 10, photo album tucked under his arm, cooler of sweet iced tea in the bed of his beat-up 2003 F-150. The drive to the assisted living is quiet, no awkward silences, just the sound of old George Strait on the radio and the wind blowing through the open windows, bluebonnets lining the highway in swathes of bright purple. Their mom lights up when she sees Leo, calls him Elena’s boy, asks when they’re going to bring the baby by, and neither of them corrects her. They sit with her for an hour, flipping through the album, pointing out old photos, laughing when she misidentifies Marnie as Elena, and when they leave, she squeezes both their hands, says you two take care of each other, okay?
They stop at a roadside taco stand on the way back, order al pastor and carnitas, sit on the tailgate of the truck watching a herd of longhorns graze in the field across the road. Marnie says she hasn’t made any friends since she moved, spends most nights alone watching old westerns, and Leo admits he hasn’t been on a single date since Elena died, told himself it was cheating, like he was breaking a promise. She leans in a little, their shoulders pressing together, and he doesn’t pull away. Elena always told me if anything ever happened to her, she wanted me to make sure you weren’t lonely, Marnie says, her voice quiet, like she’s sharing a secret. She knew we got along, even when we bickered. He turns his hand over, palm up, and she laces her fingers through his, her skin soft from 30 years of wearing latex gloves at work, his rough from decades of stitching leather, calluses catching on each other.
They finish their tacos, crumple the foil wrappers and toss them in the trash can by the stand, and he drives her back to her cottage, the sun dipping low in the sky, painting the clouds pink and orange. He walks her to the porch, and she turns to him, twisting that silver ring on her finger again, asks if he wants to come in for another glass of iced tea, maybe watch that old John Wayne movie she’d mentioned. He nods, no hesitation, no twist of guilt in his chest for the first time in 17 years. The screen door creaks shut behind them, and she reaches for his hand as she leads him to the kitchen.
