Rico Morales, 57, custom bootmaker with a scar slicing through his left eyebrow and a 3-month wait list for hand-tooled cowboy boots, had claimed the far folding table at the West Austin crawfish boil 45 minutes before the first pot was dumped. He’d shown up alone, same as he had every year since his wife left 8 years prior, a cold Shiner in one hand and a pocket knife for prying crawfish tails in the other. He hated small talk, hated the way neighbors kept trying to set him up with their divorced sisters and dental hygienists, so he stuck to the edges where the zydeco band’s accordion didn’t make his ears ring too bad.
The seat next to him opened for 10 whole seconds before Lila dropped into it, carrying a heaping paper plate of mudbugs and a corn cob slathered in melted butter. She was his next door neighbor Marnie’s niece, in town from New Orleans for two weeks organizing grant funding for hurricane-damaged homes down in the Gulf. He’d seen her once three years prior, when she’d stopped through to drop Marnie off after a family funeral, but he’d barely said two words to her then, too focused on finishing a pair of ostrich leather boots for a rancher out in Fredericksburg. Her shoulder brushed his bicep when she leaned across the table to grab a roll of paper towels, and he caught a whiff of jasmine perfume cut with the sharp, briny tang of crawfish boil seasoning. He tensed up immediately, half convinced every pair of eyes at the boil was turned their way, half furious at himself for noticing how the sun caught the gold streaks in her dark curly hair.
She didn’t seem to notice his stiffness. She held out her left wrist, where a tiny purple and green Mardi Gras bead tattoo wrapped around the pulse point, and asked if he’d ever gotten ink that small. He stared at the tattoo for two beats too long, then held up his left thumb, where a thick pale scar ran across the knuckle from a stitching machine malfunction two years back. “Only work-related ink,” he said, and she laughed, a rough, warm sound that cut over the band’s latest cover. Her fingers brushed his knuckle when she leaned in to get a better look at the scar, deliberate, not an accident, and his throat went dry. He’d forgotten what it felt like for someone to touch him like that, like they actually wanted to, not like they were just checking if he was okay after a machine bit him.
He spent the next 20 minutes fighting with himself, half of him screaming that this was a terrible idea, that she was 22 years younger than him, that Marnie would kill him if she so much as thought he was looking at her niece the wrong way, the other half replaying the feeling of her fingers on his skin, the way she’d laughed at his dumb joke about the time a customer asked him to tool a portrait of his pet goldfish on a pair of boots. She told him she still had the pair of roper boots he’d made her back when she visited in 2020, that she’d worn them through every gutting job she’d done post-hurricane, that she’d refused to get them resoled by anyone in New Orleans because she didn’t trust anyone else to do it right.
When the band kicked into a loud, raucous version of Jolie Blonde, the crowd surged toward the makeshift dance floor, kids screaming as they chased each other with discarded crawfish claws, and she nodded her head toward the side of the lot, right next to the fence of his boot shop. “Too loud over here,” she said, and he followed her without thinking, his work boots crunching over discarded shells and crumpled napkins stuck to the asphalt. They leaned against the weathered cedar fence, so close their hips pressed together through his denim work pants and her cutoff shorts, and he could feel the heat coming off her skin even through the fabric, sticky with the thick April humidity. She tilted her head up to look at him, her eyes glinting in the warm glow of the string lights strung above his shop awning, and he didn’t even have time to overthink it before she leaned up and kissed him, her lips tasting like cayenne pepper and root beer.
He kissed her back for three whole seconds before he pulled back, half expecting to see a crowd staring, half expecting her to laugh and say it was a dumb joke. But she didn’t. She just smiled, and wiped a smudge of crawfish seasoning off his cheek with her thumb. “I’ll bring those boots by your shop tomorrow at 10,” she said, and he nodded, too dumbfounded to fumble for a clever reply. He walked her the three doors down to Marnie’s front porch, and she squeezed his hand once, firm, before she turned to unlock the screen door, her curls bouncing as she stepped inside.
He turned back toward the distant sound of the band, the faint taste of jasmine still lingering on his lips, and kicked a loose piece of gravel that skittered across the sidewalk and clattered into the storm drain.
