Manny Ruiz is 51, runs a custom cowboy boot shop out of a cinder block building east of Fort Worth’s stockyards, and hasn’t attended a single community event since his wife left him for a long-haul trucker eight years prior. His only social outlet is the 22-year-old apprentice who sleeps on his couch half the week, so when the kid badgers him into hitting the summer West 7th street fair to scope new leather suppliers, Manny caves mostly to get the kid to stop nagging him about “dying alone surrounded by half-finished boot lasts.” He shows up in his usual work uniform: frayed denim shirt dotted with leather dye stains, steel-toe work boots, a beat up Stetson pushed back on his head, already annoyed by the crowd of screaming kids and street performers.
He’s halfway through arguing with a supplier over the price of full grain bison hide when he reaches for a sample swatch at the exact same time as the woman next to him. Their hands brush. The callus on the pad of her index finger catches on the rough edge of the leather, and Manny yanks his hand back like he’s been burned when he recognizes her. Lila Marquez. Ex-wife of the guy who runs the only other custom boot shop within 30 miles, the same guy who’s been undercutting Manny’s prices for three years, spreading lies that Manny cuts corners on heel reinforcement, once stole a $2000 custom order right out from under him two weeks before a customer’s wedding. Manny hasn’t said the guy’s name out loud in two years, has a rule that anyone who mentions him in the shop has to buy the whole crew a round of Shiner Bock at the bar down the street.
She smirks, holding the swatch between her thumb and index finger, leaning in just close enough that Manny can smell jasmine perfume mixed with the charred onion from the bratwurst stall two booths over. She’s wearing a faded 1996 Tool tour tee, cutoff denim shorts, and a pair of cowboy boots Manny would recognize anywhere: the custom pair he made 10 years ago, with hand-carved turquoise inlay along the shafts, the exact pair her ex-husband had commissioned for their 15th anniversary. She catches him staring at the boots, wiggles her foot a little so the sunlight catches the turquoise. “He tried to take these when we moved out,” she says, voice low, rough around the edges like she’s been smoking Camels for 20 years. “Told him I’d run over his favorite set of tooling knives with my F-150 if he so much as touched them.”
Manny doesn’t know what to say. His first instinct is to walk away, to go find his apprentice and bolt for the shop, to pretend this interaction never happened. But she’s funny. She teases him about the time her ex spent three days yelling at his crew because he couldn’t get the heel stitching as tight as Manny’s, says she’s seen his new line of work boots for ranch hands, thinks the reinforced toe design is genius. They walk through the fair together, stopping to look at a booth of hand-tooled leather belts, their arms brushing every time they reach for the same item, her shoulder bumping his when she laughs at his joke about her ex’s terrible habit of wearing white cowboy boots with a suit to trade shows. A cover band down the street is playing old George Strait, the bass thrumming through the asphalt under their feet, the air thick with the smell of fried Oreos and citrus from the snow cone stand.
They duck into a beer garden tent to get out of the sun, she buys him a Shiner Bock, they sit at a rickety picnic table at the edge of the crowd. Her knee brushes his under the table, once, then again, deliberate this time, and Manny feels his face heat up like he’s 16 again talking to a girl at a high school dance. He’s been so closed off for so long, so focused on holding his grudge against her ex, on running his shop, that he forgot what it feels like to have someone look at him like he’s interesting, like he’s more than just the guy who makes good boots. She leans in across the table, elbows resting on the splintered wood, and tells him she’s been stopping by his shop once a month for six months, dropping off pairs of her ex’s boots that “needed repair” just to see him, that she left him half a dozen notes with the front desk that he never got because his apprentice thought they were hate mail from her ex and threw them away.
He asks her to come by the shop the next day, says he has a whole bison hide he’s been saving for a custom order that he’s never had the right customer for. She nods, grinning, unlocking her truck door. He tucks his hand into hers when she turns to climb in, already mentally mapping the turquoise inlay he’d carve along the boot shafts just for her.
