Manny Marquez is 62, has run Manny’s Boot & Tack Repair out of a cinder block shop on the edge of Silver Creek, Colorado for eight years. He’s stubborn to a fault, hasn’t let anyone set foot in his trailer’s kitchen except his 12-year-old hound dog since his ex-wife left him for a ski instructor in 2011, and goes out of his way to avoid the town’s endless gossip mill. He only leaves the shop twice a week: once to stock up on beef jerky and coffee at the general store, once to drop off custom leather keychains at the farmers market every Saturday.
The mid-July sun is brutal when he hauls his cardboard box of keychains across the market gravel, sweat sticking his faded flannel sleeve to his forearm, the faint smell of roasted green chiles drifting from the food stand at the far end. He’s half watching a kid chase a stray cat, half checking his phone for repair requests, when he slams right into someone carrying a mason jar half full of pickled okra. The jar tilts, brine sloshing over the edge, and he grabs for it on instinct, his calloused palm wrapping around the cool glass before it can spill all over her linen pants.
He knows who she is immediately. Elara Voss, the new town librarian, moved here three months prior from Chicago, and the local gossip group has been dissecting every move she makes ever since. They say she quit a six-figure corporate law job to run a tiny mountain library for $18 an hour, that she’s running from a scandal, that she’s “too sharp, too city” to fit in here. Manny has ignored every warning to steer clear, but he’s still avoided her up until now, convinced any new connection is more trouble than it’s worth.
She laughs, a low, warm sound that cuts through the market noise, and steps a little closer to steady herself, her elbow brushing the bare skin of his wrist. He smells lavender and lemon off her hand lotion, notices the silver streaks threading through her dark wavy hair, the freckles scattered across her nose from the sun. She’s wearing scuffed white hiking boots and a worn wool sweater even in the heat, and there’s a smudge of ink on her left cheek like she fell asleep editing a book the night before. “You’re Manny, right?” she says, wiping a drop of brine off her wrist with the hem of her sweater. “I’ve been meaning to track you down. You left a beat-up copy of Lonesome Dove on the library counter when you applied for a card last month. I’ve got a whole stack of old westerns someone donated, figured you’d like them more than the dust on our shelves.”
Manny blinks, surprised anyone even noticed he was there, let alone what book he was carrying. He wipes a smudge of leather dye off his jaw with the back of his hand, and when he looks back up, she’s leaning in a little, her eyes crinkling at the corners like she’s amused by how flustered he is. Her shoulder is almost pressed to his now, close enough that he can feel the heat off her skin through the thin fabric of her shirt, and he doesn’t step back, even though every stubborn bone in his body is telling him to run back to his shop and lock the door.
She nods at the dive bar two blocks down the road, the one with the neon cowboy sign that flickers on and off all night. “I was gonna grab a beer after I finish walking the market. You wanna come? I won’t even make you talk about books if you don’t want to.” Manny almost says no, almost makes up an excuse about a last minute boot repair he needs to get done, almost caves to the voice in his head that says the town will be gossiping about them by sundown, that this will end just as badly as his marriage did. But then she grins, a little dimple popping in her left cheek, and he says yes before he can talk himself out of it.
The bar is dim and cool when they walk in, the jukebox playing old George Strait deep cuts, the smell of fried peanuts and beer hanging in the air. They sit in a booth in the back, far away from the few regulars nursing drinks at the bar, and she tells him she quit the law firm two years after her husband died of a heart attack, that she couldn’t stand the quiet of their big city condo, that she moved here because her grandma had a cabin outside town when she was a kid, that it was the only place she ever felt calm. He tells her about his ex-wife, about how he moved to Silver Creek to get away from all the places they used to go together, about how he thought he’d spend the rest of his life alone with his hound dog and his leather work. Their knees brush under the table halfway through their second beer, and neither of them moves away.
They leave the bar as the sun is dipping below the mountains, the sky turning pink and orange over the pine trees. He walks her to her beat-up old pickup truck, and she leans in, kissing him soft on the cheek, her lips warm against his sunburned skin. “I’ll bring those books by your shop tomorrow around noon,” she says, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Don’t make up an excuse to be gone, okay?”
He nods, leaning against the side of the truck, and waves as she pulls out of the parking lot. He gets in his own truck a minute later, turns the key, and the same George Strait song they were listening to inside the bar comes on the radio. He reaches up, touching the spot on his cheek where she kissed him, and smiles for the first time in years that doesn’t have anything to do with a dog or a perfectly repaired boot.
