Leo Marquez, 64, has been making custom cowboy boots out of his cinder block shop on the edge of Lufkin, Texas, for 38 years. His hands are crisscrossed with tiny scars from awl slips, his jeans are permanently stiff with leather conditioner, and he hasn’t so much as flirted with a woman since his wife Elaine died of lung cancer eight years prior. His biggest flaw, per his only sister Rita, is that he cares way too much what the bored retirees at the local diner say about anyone’s business. He’s spent the last three hours manning a boot repair booth at the annual volunteer fire department carnival, patching scuffed toes and gluing down loose heels for cash that goes straight to the department’s new truck fund.
The air smells like fried funnel cake and burnt hot dogs, crickets chirp loud enough to cut through the distant whoop of kids on the Tilt-A-Whirl, and the neon on the Ferris wheel paints the edges of his booth in washes of electric pink and tangerine. He’s wiping beeswax off a work glove when a shadow falls over the table, and he looks up to see Marnie Hale.
He knows exactly who she is. She’s 47, the new county librarian, and she was married to Elaine’s younger brother Jake until he bailed three years ago for a 28-year-old realtor in Austin. Leo was the only person in Elaine’s family who brought her a chicken casserole the week Jake left, mostly because he knew what it felt like to come home to an empty house you’d planned to fill with someone else. He left it on her porch and drove off before she could answer the door, too worried the neighbors would spot him and start running their mouths.
She leans her hip against the edge of the booth, holding a pair of well-worn tan cowboy boots scuffed raw on the toes, and the sleeve of her flannel shirt brushes his forearm when she sets them down. Her nail polish is chipped pale green, and he can smell her perfume, sharp and soft at the same time, like cedar chips and ripe pear. “Scuffed ‘em hiking the Boykin Springs trail yesterday,” she says, holding his eye contact longer than casual conversation calls for, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a half smile. “Tried to step over a cottonmouth and missed the root by an inch.”
Leo picks up the boots, and the leather is still warm from where she was wearing them ten minutes prior. He runs his thumb over the deep scuff on the left toe, testing the grain, and his knuckle brushes the side of her hand where she’s resting it on the table. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away. He’s suddenly hyper aware of the sweat beading at the back of his neck, the way the carnival noise sounds like it’s coming through a pillow for a second. “You hike in cowboy boots?” he says, teasing, buying time to get his head straight. Half of him is screaming that this is wrong, that everyone in town will say he’s disrespecting Elaine’s memory, that he’s too old to be acting like a lovesick teenager. The other half is buzzing, bright and hot, like he hasn’t felt fully awake in years.
“Better than slipping in those stupid trail sneakers everyone raves about,” she shoots back, tapping the toe of the boot with her finger. “And don’t act like you don’t make boots specifically for hikers, Marquez. I’ve seen the pairs you leave by the diner for the park rangers.” He laughs, surprised she’s paid that much attention. He hadn’t realized she’d even noticed he existed, not after he bailed on her porch three years back.
He patches the scuff in ten minutes flat, glues the slightly loose heel on the right boot, buffs the whole pair until they shine. When he hands them back, she hoists herself up on the edge of the booth to put them on, lifting her left foot a little like she’s expecting him to help. He doesn’t think, just reaches out to slip the boot over her sock, and his palm brushes the soft, warm skin of her ankle right above the cuff. They both freeze for half a second, and he can hear the hum of the Ferris wheel motor over the noise of the crowd.
“You gonna ask me to get a funnel cake with extra powdered sugar after this, or you gonna keep hiding behind that leather apron like you did at the lake cleanup back in April?” she says, soft enough that only he can hear it. Leo blinks, stunned. He’d seen her at that cleanup, had even picked up a beer can she’d dropped near the shore, but he’d ducked behind a group of high school volunteers before she could spot him. He opens his mouth to say he didn’t think she’d be interested, that he was worried about people talking, and she rolls her eyes, playful. “I’ve been leaving those western paperbacks you like on your shop porch for three months. You really think the library just randomly drops off Louis L’Amour books on random people’s steps?”
He barks a laugh, loud enough that a couple of kids passing by glance over. He’d wondered where those books were coming from, had even asked Rita if she’d been leaving them, but she’d sworn she hadn’t. He yanks the leather apron over his head, hangs it on the nail hammered into the booth’s support beam, and yells over to the 16-year-old fire department volunteer manning the adjacent face painting booth to cover for him for an hour. He holds out his hand, calloused and scarred, and she laces her fingers through his. Her palm is soft, but there are tiny calluses on her fingertips from turning hundreds of book pages a day.
They walk toward the funnel cake stand, and he sees a group of the diner regulars staring from their picnic table, nudging each other. He doesn’t even spare them a second glance. The Ferris wheel light paints her cheeks pink, and she’s telling him about the baby copperhead she found in the library’s basement last week, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t care what anyone has to say about any of it. He steps up to the stand, orders a funnel cake with extra powdered sugar and two cherry Cokes, and when the vendor hands him the paper plate, she swipes a finger through the sugar before he can even take a bite.
