Ronan O’Malley, 53, spent 27 years hauling freight cross-country before he retired and opened a tiny artisanal jerky stand off the Blue Ridge Parkway outside Asheville. For eight years, ever since his wife Eileen died of breast cancer, he’d avoided every casual advance, every neighbor’s attempt to set him up, every lingering smile from a regular at his stand. His flaw was stupid, he knew it: he’d convinced himself even noticing another woman meant he was erasing the 22 years he’d had with Eileen, that wanting any small, soft thing for himself was a betrayal. He stuck to his routine: up at 5 a.m. to smoke jerky, work the stand until 6, eat frozen dinner alone on his couch, fall asleep to old Westerns. He’d only entered the town’s annual chili cook-off on a dare from his neighbor Marnie, who’d dropped off Eileen’s crumpled chipotle chili recipe on his porch three weeks prior and told him to stop moping.
The October air smelled like smoked paprika, pine, and cheap light beer sloshing out of plastic cups when he leaned against the rickety picnic table next to his chili pot, wiping his calloused hands on his faded gray flannel. The scar on his left hand, the one he’d gotten when a tire rim fell on him outside Amarillo in 2011, pulled tight when he curled his fingers around the edge of the pot’s lid. He was about to pack up early, convinced he’d lose to the local fire department’s team anyway, when she stepped up.
Lila, Marnie’s niece, in town from Portland to help her aunt recover from knee replacement surgery. He’d carried Marnie’s groceries up her porch steps two weeks prior, exchanged a five-sentence chat with her then, had thought about her laugh at least a dozen times since, much to his own annoyance. She was wearing an oversized flannel that matched the hue of his, scuffed white boots, a silver nose ring that glinted in the sun. She leaned in to sniff the chili, her shoulder brushing his bicep through the fabric of his shirt, and he tensed up so fast he almost knocked over the stack of sample cups.
“Smells way better than the bean slop the fire guys are serving over there,” she said, nodding toward the other end of the field where bluegrass blared from a beat-up speaker. She held out a hand for a sample, and when he passed her the little plastic cup, her knuckle brushed the scar on his left hand. She paused, running her thumb over the raised, pale skin for half a second before she pulled back, raising an eyebrow. “How’d you get that?”
“Tire rim gave up on me mid-route in Texas,” he said, his throat dryer than it had been in years. He could smell jasmine lotion on her, mixed with the campfire smoke hanging over the field, and he had to fight the urge to lean in closer. He kept shifting his weight, half wanting to step back, half wanting to close the six-inch gap between their knees where they leaned against the picnic table. She held eye contact for a beat longer than polite every time he spoke, biting her lower lip when he joked about the terrible truck stop coffee he’d survived on for decades, laughing so hard she snort-laughed when he told the story about the time he’d hauled a trailer full of llamas that escaped outside Kansas City.
He kept feeling that sharp twist of shame in his gut every time his gaze drifted to her mouth, every time he noticed the faint gold flecks in her green eyes. He kept thinking of Eileen, of the way she’d drag him to this exact cook-off every year, of the way she’d tease him for being a grump who secretly loved when people gushed over his chili. He almost made an excuse to leave three separate times, convinced he was being a stupid old man, that he was going to ruin whatever casual, friendly thing this was before it even started.
When the emcee called his name for second place 20 minutes later, Lila whooped so loud half the crowd turned to look. She grabbed his arm and pulled him into a hug, her chest pressed tight to his, her hair falling against his cheek, and he froze for half a second, his hands hovering over her waist. For one split second he felt that familiar lurch of guilt, then he remembered Eileen’s last words to him in the hospice bed, her thin hand wrapped around his, telling him she’d haunt his ass if he spent the rest of his life sitting alone in their empty house. He wrapped his arm around her waist, holding her for two extra beats, not caring if the old ladies from the church down the street were staring, not caring if he felt like he was breaking some unwritten rule he’d made up for himself.
When they stepped back, she was smiling, a little shy, the tips of her ears pink. “Told you your chili was better than the fire guys’,” she said, nudging his boot with hers.
He pulled the second place ribbon off the certificate the emcee had handed him, tucking it into the pocket of his flannel next to the crumpled photo of Eileen he kept there. He nodded toward the treeline at the edge of the field, where the small creek he fished at every Sunday ran through the oak trees. “Got a cooler of spiced hard cider in the back of my F150,” he said, surprised at how steady his voice was. “Got a folding chair stashed back by the creek too, if you want to ditch the rest of this.”
She grinned, tucking a strand of brown hair streaked with red behind her ear, and squeezed his wrist for half a second before she turned to walk toward Marnie’s folding chair on the other side of the field. He leaned against the picnic table, twisting the edge of the chili pot’s lid between his calloused fingers, and watched her weave through the crowd, the golden hour sun gilding the edges of her denim jacket.
