Rayford “Ray” Culp, 62, retired feed mill manager from Franklin, Virginia, had spent the last 12 years avoiding any gathering that required small talk. His wife left him for a cross-country RV salesman in 2011, and he’d retreated into his routine: tuning up his 1987 F150, keeping a small vegetable garden, and leaving town once a month to buy parts for the half-restored John Deere tractor in his barn. The only reason he’d showed up to the fire department’s annual chili cookoff was that the chief was his cousin, and he’d threatened to stop cutting Ray’s grass if he bailed again.
He stood off by the oak tree at the edge of the fairgrounds, paper plate loaded with three-alarm chili, beer in a foam coozie printed with the feed mill’s old logo, when he saw her. Elara Mendez, 54, the woman who’d moved into the old farmhouse three miles down his road three months prior, who ran a mobile pet grooming van out of her driveway. The guys at the picnic table behind him were elbowing each other, muttering crude jokes about how she’d left a rich lawyer husband in Richmond to “play country girl,” how she probably had a line of single guys knocking on her door after dark. Ray rolled his eyes. He’d seen her haul a 110-pound bag of grain for her goats up her porch steps by herself when her van broke down last month, no pleas for help, no histrionics. He’d left a jug of diesel by her mailbox the next morning, no note.
She spotted him before he could turn away, waved, and started walking over, a plate of crumbly cornbread balanced in one hand, a can of seltzer in the other. She was in cutoff jean shorts that showed the faded tattoo of a German shepherd on her left calf, a faded 90s country concert tee, work boots caked with white dog hair, sun streaks bleached into her dark auburn hair. Halfway to him, she tripped over a cooler power cord, and grabbed his bicep to steady herself. Her palm was calloused, warm, and he caught a whiff of coconut sunscreen and the faint pine-scented dog shampoo he’d smelled drifting from her van when he drove past her house the week before. She laughed, low and throaty, and apologized, brushing a strand of hair off her face, her knuckles brushing his jaw by accident.
“Been meaning to track you down,” she said, holding up a jar of dark purple jam she’d tucked in her back pocket. “Blackberry, picked from the bushes behind my house. Figured it was the least I could do for the guy who left me that diesel when I was stranded.” His ears went hot, and he mumbled that it was nothing, he’d had extra sitting in his truck bed anyway. He hadn’t been this close to a woman who wasn’t his cousin’s wife in over a decade, and his throat felt tight, like he’d swallowed a mouthful of the too-spicy chili.
The moment broke when Earl, the local auto shop owner who’d been making the crude jokes earlier, yelled over from the picnic table. “Hey Elara! You gonna groom my old coonhound later, or you got time for something more fun first?” The guys around him snickered, and Ray’s jaw clenched, his hand curling into a fist at his side. Before he could say anything, Elara turned, grinning sharp, and yelled back so the whole crowd could hear. “Earl, last time I saw that hound he had fleas so bad he was chewing his own tail off. You wanna let me fix him first, or you wanna keep letting him live in the same filth as that trailer you keep parked behind your shop?” The whole fairground erupted in laughter, and Earl went bright red, staring down at his chili like it owed him money.
She turned back to Ray, rolling her eyes, and nodded at the tailgate of his F150 parked 10 feet away. “You wanna sit? These boots are killing my feet, and I don’t feel like listening to those idiots hit on me for another hour.” He nodded, and they walked over, sitting side by side, their knees brushing when they settled in. She told him she’d left her husband in Richmond because he’d spent 20 years telling her that running a pet grooming business was “a silly hobby for bored housewives,” that she should stick to her paralegal job and go to country club mixers on the weekends. He told her he’d barely spoken to anyone outside his family in 12 years, that he’d thought everyone in town was just a nosy busybody until now.
She leaned over to grab a napkin from the roll tucked under his truck seat, and her shoulder pressed against his, her hair falling across his arm. She held eye contact for three full beats, no look away, and he could see the flecks of gold in her dark green eyes, the faint laugh lines around her mouth. “I got a peach pie cooling on my counter right now,” she said, soft enough only he could hear. “And three rescue puppies I’m fostering that keep chewing my shoes. You wanna come over tomorrow around 2? We can eat pie, watch them make a mess, and you can tell me all about that tractor you’re restoring. I saw it in your barn when I drove by last week.”
He said yes before he could overthink it, before he could make up some excuse about having to fix his fence or weed his garden. She smiled, squeezed his knee once, then stood up, saying she had to drop off the rest of her cornbread to the firemen working the grill. She winked at him over her shoulder as she walked away, and he sat there, finishing his beer, watching the sun dip below the treeline, for once not caring if the whole town was staring at him, gossiping about him later. He picked up the jar of blackberry jam she’d left in his hand before she stood up, twisted off the lid, and licked a dollop off his thumb, sweet and tart and better than anything he’d tasted in 12 years.
