He was leaning against the tailgate of his rusted 2003 F150 wiping brisket grease off his knuckles with a crumpled napkin when he saw her walking toward him, auburn hair streaked with sun pulled back in a loose braid, faded Robert Earl Keen tee hanging off one shoulder, cowboy boots caked in dust from the fairground parking lot. That was Clara, Earl’s wife. He’d known her for 12 years, first met her when she brought Earl’s pickup into his shop to fix a blown transmission, had always thought she was too sharp, too quick to laugh at his dumb truck jokes, to be stuck with a guy who spent half his time at the bar down the road from their house. She stopped a foot away from him, holding two cold cans of peach seltzer, and he caught the faint scent of cedar from the candles she sold at the local farmers’ market mixing with the hickory smoke curling off the rib pits 20 yards away.
She sat down on the tailgate next to him without asking, her denim cutoff brushing his bare calf when she shifted to cross her legs, and he froze for half a second, suddenly hyper aware of how close she was, the heat from her thigh seeping through the thin fabric of his work shorts. She held out one of the seltzers, and when he reached for it, a kid in a cowboy hat darted past, slamming into her shoulder, and her hand brushed his, cold from the can, for three full beats before she pulled back, cheeks pink, and said Earl wasn’t coming. He’d bailed that morning, she said, drove up to Oklahoma with the 22-year-old waitress from the diner they ate at every Sunday, had texted her from the highway to say he wasn’t coming back. She’d asked Earl to send Manny to the cookoff, she admitted, because she didn’t want to call him out of the blue, had wanted to talk to him alone for months.
Manny’s first instinct was to stand up, mumble an apology, drive back to his shop and hide under the hood of the 1979 Kenworth he’d been restoring for 10 years, the one he’d promised himself he’d finish before even thinking about dating anyone. Earl might have been a deadbeat, but he’d done business with him for a dozen years, and messing around with the guy’s wife felt like breaking some unwritten rule he’d carried since he was a kid working at his dad’s auto shop. But then he looked at her, picking at the label on her seltzer can, the faint scar on her wrist from the time she’d fallen off her bike at 17 and he’d driven her to the ER, and the guilt softened into something he hadn’t felt in 18 years, warm and sharp and alive in his chest. He didn’t move. He popped the tab on his seltzer, took a sip, and asked her how long she’d known.
They left 10 minutes later, her riding in the passenger seat of his F150, singing along to the old country station he kept preset, her hand resting on the center console an inch from his. He drove her back to his shop, flipped on the overhead lights, and pulled the tarp off the cherry red Kenworth. He helped her climb up into the passenger seat, the vinyl still cool from sitting unused all week, and slid into the driver’s seat next to her, turning the key so the radio hummed to life. He reached across the vinyl seat to tuck a stray strand of sun-bleached auburn hair behind her ear, his calloused thumb brushing the soft curve of her jaw for half a beat longer than necessary.
