Rafe Mendez, 52, had spent 27 years carving custom leather saddles out of his cinder block garage outside Pendleton, Oregon, and he’d spent the last 8 of those years actively avoiding any situation that required him to talk to a woman for longer than it took to ring up a sale. A messy divorce had left him convinced casual connection was just a fancy word for future disappointment, and he’d gotten comfortable with his routine: early mornings feeding his three border collies, 10 hour days hunched over his workbench, cold beer and old Westerns on the couch after dark. The annual Umatilla County Fair was the only thing that disrupted it, a three-day stretch of fried dough fumes, screaming carnival rides, and small talk he’d rather skip, but it made up 40% of his annual sales, so he showed up.
He was wiping tooling dust off a saddle built for a teen barrel racer when Lila walked up. He recognized her before she said a word, the same sun-bleached blonde braid down her back, the same scuffed work boots she’d worn since she was 16, now caked with goat pen mud instead of 4H horse stall muck. She was Joe’s stepdaughter, his old mentor who’d died of a heart attack two years prior, and Rafe had spent the better part of two decades actively not looking at her too long, convinced any flicker of interest was a betrayal of the man who’d given him his first carving knife. The fair speakers were blaring a Toby Keith deep cut so loud he could feel the bass in his boots, so she leaned in close when she said hello, her shoulder brushing his bicep, the scent of lavender laundry soap and alfalfa clinging to her flannel shirt.
She held out a jar of dill pickles, homemade, her calloused farm hand brushing his when he took it. “Saw your booth listed on the fair map,” she said, holding his eye contact longer than strictly necessary, a fleck of pink cotton candy stuck to her lower lip that she licked off slow, like she knew he was watching. “Joe’s old roping saddle’s been sitting in his cabin gathering dust since he passed. Figured you’re the only one who’d know how to fix the cracked stirrup leather without ruining the tooling.”
Rafe’s throat went dry. He’d worked on that saddle a dozen times, knew every scratch on the leather, every little carving Joe had put into the cantle. He also knew the cabin she was talking about was on the far edge of the fairgrounds, tucked behind the oak trees, no neighbors for a quarter mile. Everyone in the local rodeo circle would side eye him if they saw him headed there alone with Lila, would call him a creep for going after Joe’s kid, even if she was 38 years old and owned her own 80 acre farm. He hesitated, his thumb brushing the raised lip of the pickle jar, and for half a second he almost made up an excuse, said he had too many sales to wrap up, that he could drop it off at her farm next week instead. But she was smiling at him, the same lopsided grin she’d had when she was 17 and snuck into Joe’s shop to watch Rafe work, and he nodded before he could talk himself out of it.
He closed up his booth an hour early, loaded the restored saddle into the back of his beat up Ford F150, and drove the slow dirt road out to the cabin, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. Half of him was screaming that this was a terrible idea, that he was going to ruin his reputation, that he was too old for this kind of nonsense, that she couldn’t possibly be interested in a guy who spent most of his days covered in leather dust and dog hair. The other half of him couldn’t stop thinking about the way her shoulder had pressed against his earlier, the way she’d held his gaze like she wasn’t just asking for a saddle repair.
The cabin’s porch light was on when he pulled up, Lila sitting on the top step, a cooler of craft beer next to her, the distant roar of the fair rides faint in the background. She stood when he walked up, took the saddle from him when he carried it up the steps, her fingers brushing his as she lifted the leather. “You added the sunflower,” she said, running her index finger over the small carved flower next to Joe’s initials, her voice soft. “I mentioned once when I was 17 that they were my favorite. I didn’t think you’d remember.”
Rafe leaned against the porch rail, popped the top on a beer she handed him, the cold aluminum biting into his palm. “I remembered,” he said, and he didn’t add that he’d thought about that offhand comment at least once a month for the last 21 years, that he’d avoided her for so long because he’d been scared to admit he’d thought about her for longer than he’d ever thought about his ex-wife.
She sat back down on the step, patted the spot next to her, and he sat, their thighs brushing through the denim of their jeans. She told him she’d had a crush on him since that first day she snuck into Joe’s shop, that every guy her age she’d dated had only cared about her farm or her dad’s old rodeo money, that Rafe was the only one who’d ever talked to her like she was a person, not a prize to win. He told her he’d avoided her for years because he’d thought wanting her was wrong, that he’d felt like he was betraying Joe, that he’d been scared to let anyone get close after his divorce.
The fair lights flickered off in the distance a little after 10, the sky dark except for the pinpricks of stars above the oak trees. She leaned her head on his shoulder, her braid falling across his arm, and he didn’t pull away.
