Rafe Mendez, 53, retired rural electric lineman for the Hill Country Electric Co-op, leaned against the splintered cedar post of the county fair beer tent, calloused fingers curled around a frosty Shiner Bock. He’d avoided the fair for three years straight, ever since his wife Clara had died of breast cancer, and he’d only showed up this year because his 16-year-old niece had begged him to come watch her show sheep. The scar slashing across his left forearm, a souvenir from the 2019 tornado that took down 12 miles of transmission line and left his work partner with a permanent limp, ached a little in the cool October wind. He hated crowds, hated the way old acquaintances would corner him to ask how he was holding up, hated that he still couldn’t give anyone a straight answer without lying.
The wind shifted, and he caught a whiff of jasmine and coconut shampoo, sharp under the pervasive smells of fried dough, cotton candy, and cow manure. A woman’s hip brushed his as she reached past his elbow for a stack of paper napkins, her bare forearm grazing the raised edge of his scar, and he flinched before he looked up. Lila Marlow, Clara’s younger cousin by two years, grinned at him, silver hoop earrings catching the late afternoon sun. She’d cut her hair since he’d last seen her, at Clara’s funeral, it was now a wavy shoulder length bob streaked with silver at the temples, and she was wearing a faded 2003 Willie Nelson tour cutoff tee, high waisted jeans, and scuffed red cowboy boots caked with mud.
He froze, half out of guilt, half out of the stupid, lingering crush he’d carried on her when they were both in their 20s, back before he’d started dating Clara. Everyone in the family had always joked they were too stubborn to ever get along, both too quick to pick a fight, too proud to back down when they were wrong. He’d spent 20 years deliberately keeping her at arm’s length, convinced liking her was some kind of betrayal, even when she’d moved to Austin and only came back for holidays.
“Thought you avoided this place like the plague,” she said, leaning against the post next to him, close enough that their shoulders brushed when she shifted her weight. Her voice was still that low, throaty purr he remembered, the kind that made his chest feel tight even when she was making fun of him. She nodded at his scar. “That the one from the tornado? I talked to Jimmie last month, he said you dragged him 30 yards to that ditch before the second tower went down. Says he owes you his life.”
Rafe stared down at his beer, throat tight. He’d spent four years carrying that guilt, convinced he’d been too slow to call the evacuation, that Jimmie’s limp was his fault. No one had ever put it that way to him, not even Jimmie. “Stupid luck,” he mumbled, taking a long sip of beer. “Should’ve pulled him out sooner.”
Lila snorted, and nudged his boot with hers. “You’ve always been way too hard on yourself. You know that, right?” She said she’d moved back to town two weeks prior, bought the old ranch house on the west edge of county, was running the new no-kill animal rescue out of the barn. The perimeter fence was half rotted through, she said, and she couldn’t find anyone who knew how to fix post and rail fence right without charging her an arm and a leg. You got any free time next week, she asked, and he almost said no, almost made up an excuse about having to fix the gutters on his house, almost ran for the exit like a scared kid.
Then he looked at her, at the faint smudge of funnel cake sugar on her upper lip, at the way her eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled, and the words died in his throat. He thought of the empty house he went home to every night, the way the silence felt so thick he could almost touch it, the way he’d been sleeping on the couch for three years because the bed felt too big alone. “I can come by tomorrow at 8,” he said, before he could talk himself out of it. “Got all my own tools. Don’t charge family.”
She laughed, and leaned in to hug him quick, her chest pressing warm against his, her hair brushing his jaw. He froze for half a second, then wrapped one arm around her back, careful not to squeeze too tight, the smell of jasmine wrapping around him so thick he forgot all about the noise of the fair, the ache in his forearm, the guilt he’d been carrying for years. When she pulled back, she slipped a scrap of paper with her phone number scrawled on it into the pocket of his flannel shirt, her fingers brushing his chest through the fabric. “I’ll make coffee,” she said. “The good stuff, not the instant crap you drink.”
She waved as she walked off toward the animal rescue booth, where a group of kids were clustered around a pen of squirming border collie mix puppies, her boots kicking up little clouds of red dirt as she went. Rafe stood there for a long minute, staring after her, then pulled the scrap of paper out of his pocket, ran his thumb over the smudged ink. He pulled out his phone, opened his calendar, and deleted the pointless fishing trip he’d planned for next weekend, already making room for more fence work, more coffee, more of that jasmine and coconut shampoo smell that felt like the first thing that’d made sense in three years.
