Manny Ruiz, 53, spent 28 years climbing transmission poles for Texas’s central power grid before a 2021 ice storm sheared off the top two joints of his left ring and pinky fingers, forcing early retirement. Now he runs a tiny solar installation shop out of a converted gas station outside Lampasas, and his biggest personality flaw is that he assumes every person who strikes up casual conversation is angling for a discounted panel setup for their ranch or mobile home. He’s been that way since his wife left him for a high school football coach three years prior, so he only leaves his shop or his single-wide when his buddy Jimmie begs him.
This time Jimmie had begged him to drop off a crockpot of brisket chili for the town’s annual fall cookoff, so Manny pulls into the community park parking lot at 2 p.m., boots crunching over crushed gravel that smells like spilled beer and burnt mesquite. The air hums with old George Strait tracks playing from a crackling speaker by the picnic tables, and half the town is milling around, sampling chili out of paper cups, laughing when a toddler dumps a plate of cornbread on his dad’s boots. Manny tucks his scarred left hand in the pocket of his faded lineman work shirt, already planning to slip out as soon as he hands off the crockpot.
Jimmie is tied up judging entries, so Manny sets the crockpot on the designated table, turns, and slams straight into a woman holding a heaping plate of cornbread and pickled okra. A dollop of honey butter slops off the top of a cornbread slice and smears across the front of his shirt. She gasps, reaching out to brush it off before she thinks, her warm palm pressing light against his chest for half a second before she pulls back, apologizing fast. Manny freezes, half ready to snap that it’s fine, he’s leaving anyway, then he looks at her. Hazel eyes, a faint smudge of chili powder across her left cheek, dark hair pulled back in a messy braid streaked with three strands of silver, a flannel shirt tied around her waist over jeans scuffed at the knee. She’s Elara, the new town librarian who moved from Chicago two months prior, he remembers, because Jimmie won’t stop complaining about how she banned his favorite old westerns from the library’s DVD collection for being “casually misogynistic.”
She laughs when he says her name, says she’s heard he’s the guy who can fix anything with a wire and a roll of electrical tape, and she’s got a stack of vintage 1970s record players at the library she can’t get to run. He doesn’t make the usual joke about bartering for a discount on library fines, because he’s still stuck on the way her hand didn’t flinch when she brushed his arm, the way she didn’t glance at his left hand even when he pulls it out of his pocket to wipe the butter off his shirt. She notices the scars a minute later, when he reaches for a sample cup of chili off a nearby table, and she doesn’t wince or make the pitying face everyone else does. She just holds up her left index finger, which has a faint purple dent across the knuckle, and says she dropped a 12-pound hardcover collection of Mary Oliver poetry on it last month rearranging the nature section, still can’t turn book pages without wincing.
They end up perched on the end of a dented picnic table bench far from the crowd, sampling every chili entry, teasing each other when the other makes a face at the too-sweet vegan chili the church ladies put in, or snorts after drinking sweet tea too fast. Their knees keep bumping under the table, neither of them moving away, and Manny can smell her perfume, something like cedar and orange peel, not the cloying floral stuff his ex wore. She leans in close when she tells him she found an old 1982 lineman training manual in a box of donated books last week, set it aside for him because she’d heard he used to climb poles for a living. He blinks, surprised no one has paid that much attention to the small details of his life in years, admits he’s been avoiding everyone because he thought all small talk was just a lead-in to asking for a solar discount. She snorts, says the only thing she wants from him is an honest review of her secret habanero chili entry, which she submitted anonymously because she didn’t want the town to judge a Chicago transplant for making Texas chili.
He takes a bite, and it’s so spicy his eyes water instantly, he coughs so hard he snorts, and she hands him a napkin, her fingers brushing his scarred left hand when she passes it over. He doesn’t pull away, just laces his fingers through hers for three slow beats, half convinced she’ll yank back, but she squeezes his hand soft, grinning like she knew he’d do it. The cookoff announcer calls the winners a few minutes later, and her chili takes third place, she cheers so loud the people at the next table turn to look. She leans over and kisses him quick on the cheek, warm and sweet, says she left the lineman manual at the library front desk for him, he can come pick it up any time, maybe bring a six pack of Shiner Bock if he’s feeling generous. He nods, watching her walk over to collect her blue ribbon prize, his left hand still tingling where she held it. He tugs his phone out of his pocket to clear his schedule for Wednesday afternoon, already mentally mapping the fastest route from his shop to the beer distributor on the west side of town.
