Rudy Gallegos, 62, retired power lineman, had spent the last eight years perfecting the art of avoiding any event that required more than three other people to be in the same 100-yard radius. His wife Elena had been the one who dragged him to parade barbecues and church potlucks, who’d laugh at his grumbling while she slipped a tamale into his work lunch pail before he climbed a 40-foot pole in 102-degree heat. When she died of ovarian cancer in 2015, he’d decided all that social nonsense wasn’t worth the effort, even when his grandkids begged him to come to their soccer games or their 4-H shows. He’d only caved this time because his 16-year-old granddaughter Lila had cried when he said no, told him she’d spent three weeks perfecting her green chili recipe for the town’s annual cookoff, and that he was the only person whose opinion she actually cared about.
He’d parked his beat-up 2002 Ford F-150 half a mile from the fairgrounds, worn his faded gray lineman flannel even though the sun was beating down hard enough to make the asphalt sweat, and planted himself by the beer tent within two minutes of walking through the gate. The air smelled like roasted pork, mesquite smoke, and cheap sunscreen, kids ran screaming past with cotton candy stuck to their cheeks, and every third person who walked by stopped to clap him on the back and ask how he’d been. He’d grunted fine each time, stared at the ground, and sipped his IPA like it was a lifeline.
He was reaching for a second beer when his boot caught on a loose hay bale, and he slammed into a woman holding a mason jar full of bright red sauce. The sauce sloshed over the rim, splattered across his left wrist, and the sting of jalapeño hit his skin before he could even apologize. “Easy there, cowboy,” she said, and he looked up to see Marnie Carter, 58, who ran the beekeeping supply shop on the edge of town, grinning at him like she’d been waiting to catch him making a fool of himself. She grabbed a crumpled napkin from the table next to her, reached for his wrist, and her palm brushed his as she blotted the sauce off. Her hand was calloused, rough from lifting hive boxes and pulling stingers out of her forearms, and she smelled like lavender lip balm and burnt cedar. He froze for half a second, so used to only touching his dog or his pickup’s steering wheel that the contact felt like a static shock.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, pulling his wrist back a little too fast. “Clumsy today.”
“Nah, the fairgrounds always lay those hay bales out like land mines for guys who’d rather be hiding in their garage than talking to people,” she said, and he blinked, surprised she’d picked up on his mood so fast. She told him she remembered him from the 2018 blizzard, when he’d driven 20 miles out to her farm in two feet of snow to fix the downed power line that ran to her hive shed, stayed three hours until the heat was back on so her queen bees didn’t freeze to death. He’d forgotten all about that, but she said she’d baked him chocolate chip cookies to say thank you and he’d turned her down, said he had to get to the next call before the roads iced over.
He felt his ears get hot, embarrassed by how gruff he’d been. He was about to make an excuse, say he had to go check on Lila’s chili, when she nodded at the empty spot on the picnic bench next to her and said she’d entered a honey-infused red chili in the adult category, dared him to taste it and tell her it wasn’t better than any of the old cowboys’ batches that were 90 percent lard and 10 percent chili powder. He hesitated, half of him screaming to leave, to go back to his truck and drive home and watch old westerns like he always did, the other half curious, drawn to the way she didn’t treat him like he was some broken widower who needed to be handled gently.
He sat down. The bench was splintered, dug into the back of his thighs through his jeans, and when she leaned in to pass him a paper bowl of chili, her knee pressed against his under the table. She didn’t move it. The chili was sweet and smoky, the honey cutting the heat just enough that it lingered on his tongue instead of burning his throat, and he laughed when she told him about the hive that swarmed on her front porch last spring, how she’d chased it down the street wearing nothing but a bathrobe and a sunhat, waving a broom like she was fighting off a gang of raccoons. He hadn’t laughed that hard in years, his sides ached, and he realized he hadn’t talked to anyone for this long that wasn’t his grandkid or the clerk at the hardware store in longer than he could remember.
The announcer called the cookoff winners over the loudspeaker right as she was telling him about the new batch of wildflower honey she’d harvested the week before. Lila won third place in the teen category, waving wildly from the stage when she saw him, and he waved back, grinning so wide his cheeks hurt. He turned back to Marnie, and she was holding a small mason jar of the honey jalapeño sauce, twisting the lid between her fingers. She scribbled her phone number on the top in black Sharpie, handed it to him, and said if he ever wanted to come out to the farm to see the hives, or just drink a beer that wasn’t the watered-down crap they sold at the beer tent, he could call whenever.
He tucked the jar into the inside pocket of his flannel, the glass warm through the fabric against his chest, and told her he’d do that. She walked back to her booth, waving over her shoulder, and he stood up to go congratulate Lila, who was already running toward him holding her blue ribbon. He thumbed the raised edge of the Sharpie scrawl on the jar lid, and for the first time in eight years, he didn’t make an excuse to cancel a plan before he’d even made it.
