Rafe Dominguez, 53, custom leather saddle maker, leans against a gnarled live oak at the annual Medina County chili cookoff, cold Shiner Bock sweating in his calloused left hand. He only showed up because his childhood buddy, a large animal vet who won the cookoff last year, begged him for three straight weeks, saying Rafe’s “resting grumpy cowboy face” would scare off the Karens who complained about too much chipotle in the entries last year. Rafe’s been flying solo for eight years, ever since his wife left him for an oil rig foreman who promised her a house in Corpus Christi with a pool and no dust from leather shavings coating every surface. His biggest flaw? He’s convinced any romantic connection is just a ticking time bomb, so he avoids small talk with anyone who isn’t ordering a $3,000 custom saddle for their show horses. The cookoff’s noise grates on him: a terrible cover band is butchering a George Strait deep cut, kids are screaming as they chase a goat around the fairgrounds, and the air reeks of grilled onions, chili powder, and cheap beer. He’s got one foot turned toward his beat-up Ford F-150, ready to bolt, when he sees her.
Lila Marquez, 48, just elected county clerk six months prior, filed for divorce two weeks ago, and the entire town’s been buzzing about it ever since. Rafe’s seen her at the county courthouse a handful of times, dropping off permits for his shop, and he’s had a quiet, stupid crush on her for years, but he never let himself act on it. She was married, for one, and she’s the kind of woman everyone in town knows: shows up to every PTA meeting, volunteers at the animal shelter, wins the peach pie contest at the county fair every other year. He’s the reclusive guy who lives in a tiny cottage behind his shop, listens to old conjunto records too loud on weekends, and hasn’t been to a town event in seven years before today. She walks straight toward him, boots kicking up red dust, copper highlights catching the late afternoon sun, and stops so close he can smell coconut sunscreen and smoked ancho chili on her breath, leftover from the sample she just tasted at the booth ten feet away.
She nods at the custom saddle bag slung over his shoulder, stitched with his brand, a tiny horseshoe wrapped in oak leaves. “Yours?” she asks, reaching out to run a finger along the stitching, and their knuckles brush when she accidentally taps the hand holding his beer. Rafe flinches like he’s been burned, and she smirks, like she can tell he’s been avoiding her for years. He mumbles something about making them for regulars, and she laughs, a warm, throaty sound that cuts through the cookoff noise, and her hand brushes his bicep when she leans in to yell over a kid screaming about winning a goldfish. Rafe’s brain short circuits. Half of him is screaming to leave, to get back to his shop where no one bothers him, where he doesn’t have to deal with the gossip mill that will definitely light up if anyone sees them talking. The other half can’t stop staring at the freckles across her nose, the way she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear when she’s listening, the faint scar on her left cheek from a horse riding accident when she was a kid.
She says she’s sick of everyone in town asking her about the divorce, sick of people acting like she’s broken because her 20 year marriage fell apart. Rafe nods, says he knows what that’s like, how everyone stared at him for six months after his wife left, like he had some contagious disease. She laughs, says she always thought he was the only person in town who didn’t care about gossip, who just minded his own business. She leans in a little, so close he can feel her breath on his jaw, and admits she’s had a crush on him since she was 22, when she saw him compete in a local rodeo, win the bronc riding contest, and tip his hat to the crowd like it was no big deal. She never said anything because he was married, and then after he got divorced, she thought he hated everyone in town and would turn her down.
Rafe sits quiet for a second, the weight of the last eight years pressing on his chest, the voice in his head saying this will end badly, that he’ll mess it up, that everyone will talk. But then he looks at her, at the way she’s biting her lip like she’s nervous she said the wrong thing, and the voice goes quiet. He admits he’s thought about her too, more times than he can count, but he thought she was happy, thought it was wrong to even look at her like that. She smiles, reaches for his beer, takes a slow sip, and when she hands it back, their fingers lacing together for half a second, he doesn’t flinch.
They sit there for an hour, talking about the saddle, about her niece, about the time he accidentally dyed a customer’s saddle neon pink because the label on the leather dye was wrong. When the sound of the cookoff’s closing announcements drift down the path, they stand up, brush the cedar chips off their jeans. She slips her hand into his, calloused from years of riding horses and hauling file boxes at the courthouse, and laces their fingers together. No one is around to see, everyone back at the fairgrounds cheering for the grand prize chili winner, too busy to notice the reclusive saddle maker and the county clerk walking back up the path, slow as molasses, neither of them in a hurry to go home alone.
