Aris Mendez, 62, retired FAA air traffic controller, hadn’t attended the neighborhood crawfish boil in eight years. Not since the car crash that killed his wife Ellie, the one he still blamed himself for because he’d broken his own unspoken rule of never deviating from a planned route to take a detour to see wild bluebonnets. He’d showed up this year only because his next-door neighbor, a retired firefighter named Jax, had banged on his door at 2 p.m. holding a cold Shiner Bock and threatened to drag him out by the collar if he didn’t stop hiding from the world.
He stood by the industrial beer cooler at the edge of the park, faded Astros cap pulled low over his graying eyebrows, work boots crusted with motor oil from fixing up his 1994 F-150 that morning. The air reeked of cayenne, boiled garlic, cut St. Augustine grass, and the sweet, acrid tang of citronella torches. ZZ Top blared from a beat-up portable speaker propped on a folding table, kids screamed as they bounced on an inflatable castle, and a group of older guys argued about the Astros’ opening day roster a few feet away. Aris was halfway to talking himself into leaving early when he felt a sharp bump to his elbow.
His half-empty beer sloshed over the rim, splattering cold lager across the bare wrist of the woman who’d run into him. She laughed, loud and throaty, wiping the beer off on the leg of her frayed cutoff jean shorts. She was Lena Hart, 48, newly divorced from the local high school football coach, Ellie’s second cousin, the girl he remembered crashing her bike into their mailbox when she was 16, gushing about how she wanted to move to Austin to be a roadie for Willie Nelson. She was wearing a faded 2019 Willie Nelson picnic tee, bare feet caked with grass clippings, chipped cherry red nail polish on her fingers, and a tiny silver hoop through her left nostril he’d never noticed before. She smelled like coconut sunscreen and lime seltzer, and when she leaned in to say hi, her shoulder brushed the bare skin of his bicep, sending a jolt up his spine he hadn’t felt in a decade.
He stammered out an apology, already reaching for a napkin off the nearby table, but she waved him off, leaning in even closer so he could hear her over the music. “Don’t even sweat it. My ex spilled an entire pitcher of margaritas on me at our divorce celebration last week, this is nothing.” She nodded at his truck, parked at the curb a few feet away, and lowered her voice. “For the record, I buried that HOA complaint Mrs. Henderson filed about you parking it on the street last week. That woman’s got a stick up her ass so far she complains about dandelions being ‘un-neighborly.’ Don’t tell anyone I said that, though, I just got elected president.”
Aris froze, his throat tight. He’d spent the last eight years intentionally keeping people at arm’s length, convinced any kind of joy or spontaneity would end in disaster, convinced dating or even flirting with anyone who wasn’t Ellie was a betrayal. He should have stepped back, thanked her, made an excuse to leave. Instead he found himself leaning in too, his face so close he could see the tiny flecks of gold in her hazel eyes, the faint scar above her left eyebrow from that bike crash decades earlier. “Thanks,” he said, his voice rougher than he expected. “I owe you one.”
She raised an eyebrow, a slow, teasing smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “You restore old CB radios, right? I found my dad’s old one in his garage last week, the one he used to take on fishing trips when I was a kid. It’s busted. I’ll bring it over Saturday, you can fix it, and we’ll call it even.”
He hesitated for half a second, every rigid, self-protective instinct screaming that this was a bad idea, that he’d break his routine, that he’d get attached, that something would go wrong. But she was still looking at him, her head tilted to the side, her bare arm still brushing his, and he found himself nodding before he could think better of it. “Yeah. Sure. Come by around 10. Workshop’s the detached garage out back, just knock.”
By 8 p.m. most of the neighborhood had cleared out, the folding tables stacked by the park pavilion, the speaker turned down to a low murmur. They were sitting on the tailgate of his truck, peeling crawfish off a paper tray he’d grabbed before the line closed, their fingers caked in red cayenne spice. She picked a fat crawfish tail out of the pile, held it out to him, and when he leaned in to take it, her fingertips brushed his lower lip. He tasted salt and cayenne and the faint, sweet tang of the lime she’d been sucking on earlier, and he froze, his eyes locking with hers. She didn’t look away, holding his gaze for three long, quiet beats, the distant sound of crickets chirping the only noise between them.
“I always thought you were the best guy on this block,” she said softly, wiping a smudge of spice off his jaw with her thumb. “Even when you were hiding out in your house and wouldn’t talk to anyone after Ellie died. I get it, you know. Grief makes you want to lock the world out. But it’s okay to let some of it back in.”
He didn’t say anything, just reached up, brushed a stray strand of sun-streaked brown hair off her face, his thumb grazing the soft skin of her cheek. She leaned into the touch, her eyes fluttering shut for half a second, and he felt the tight knot in his chest he’d carried for eight years loosen just a little.
She left 10 minutes later, grabbing her canvas tote bag off the ground, yelling over her shoulder that she’d see him Saturday, that she’d bring kolaches from the Czech bakery on 19th Street. He stayed sitting on the tailgate long after her taillights disappeared around the corner, sipping a warm Shiner Bock, the taste of crawfish spice still lingering on his tongue, the ghost of her cheek under his thumb playing on repeat in his head.
He twisted the cap off another beer, the cool aluminum biting into his calloused palm, and smiled for the first time in longer than he could remember.
