Elias Marquez, 53, custom saddle maker, spent the first hour of the Kendall County Fall Festival pretending to taste test chili just to avoid making small talk with the former classmates who kept stopping to clap him on the back and ask if he’d finally “stopped hiding out in his shop.” His left knee ached from standing on the uneven grass, the old college football ACL tear throbbing when the wind picked up, and he’d already hidden half a dozen over-sweet festival lemonades in a nearby trash can to avoid offending the teen volunteers who kept pressing them on him. His only plan was to sneak out in 20 minutes, get back to his air-conditioned workshop, and finish tooling a floral saddle for a rancher out in Boerne, no small talk, no forced smiles, no people required.
He didn’t remember deciding to walk over, but suddenly he was standing in front of her booth, his scuffed work boots planted in the grass, his hands stuffed awkwardly in the pockets of his oil-stained flannel. She looked up, grinned, and wiped her hands on the front of her denim apron. “You’re the saddle guy who lives next to the oak with the red-headed woodpecker nest, right? I’ve seen your truck parked out by the barn.” He nodded, fumbled for words for a full three seconds before he gestured at the row of jam jars lined up on the table. “Heard your peach bourbon one is the best here.” She grabbed a saltine, dolloped a thick scoop of jam on top, and held it out to him. Their fingers brushed when he took it, and he felt a jolt run up his arm that had nothing to do with his old knee injury. The jam was sweet, the bourbon burn soft at the back of his throat, and he found himself leaning against the edge of the booth, no longer checking his watch every two minutes.
They talked for 15 minutes, about the woodpecker that kept waking her up at 6 a.m., about the broken leather strap on her grandma’s 70-year-old canning crate she’d been trying to fix for months, about the way the county had raised the fair vendor fees so much half the regulars couldn’t afford to set up booths this year. He kept fighting the urge to ask her to get a drink later, that little voice in his head reminding him every time he’d let someone get close after his ex-wife left 11 years prior, it ended with him feeling too quiet, too stuck in his routines, too boring for anyone to want to stick around. He was mid-sentence about the saddle he was working on when a group of drunk 20-somethings stumbled past, one slamming his shoulder into the side of the booth hard enough that a full jar of peach jam teetered off the edge.
He moved without thinking, snatching the jar out of the air with one hand and wrapping his other arm around her waist to yank her out of the way of the glass if it fell. For half a second they were pressed chest to chest, he could smell her lavender lotion under the sticky sweet smell of jam, her hand was resting on the bicep where he’d scraped it three weeks prior, and she brushed the thin, pale scar there with her thumb. “You don’t have to hide out in that shop all the time, you know,” she said, her voice soft enough that only he could hear it over the festival noise. He held her gaze, didn’t overthink it the way he usually did, asked her if she wanted to get carnitas tacos at that little hole in the wall off Route 281 after the festival wrapped up. She grinned, nodded, and said she was only coming if she could bring a jar of the peach bourbon jam to drizzle on the tacos.
He laughed, the first real, full laugh he’d had in months, not the polite half-chuckle he used for customers and old football buddies. He slipped the jar of jam he’d caught into the inner pocket of his flannel, the glass warm against his side from the afternoon sun, and leaned against the booth next to her, no longer in a hurry to leave. A kid ran past waving a cotton candy stick, and she reached out to tap his shoulder to point at a dog wearing a cowboy hat trotting past the pet parade booth.
