Elio Ruiz, 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, has spent the last 18 years avoiding any interaction that could lead to more than a quick wave over a fence or a grunted order at the hardware store. His ex-wife left him for his former assistant coach a week after their 20th anniversary, and he’d decided then that casual connection wasn’t worth the risk of having the rug pulled out from under him again. He spends most weekends at the riverfront beer garden, restoring vintage picnic tables for the park district on the side, and he’d entered the annual chili cookoff on a lark, just to have an excuse to use the brisket he’d smoked for 12 hours the night before.
She’s in town to visit her grandma, she says, runs a dog grooming business out of her garage outside Lexington, got divorced three years prior after her long-haul trucker ex got a waitress in Des Moines pregnant. They pass plastic spoons back and forth, tasting each other’s entries, she teases him that his brisket chili is so spicy it’ll clear a sinus infection for a year, he rags on her for putting too much cinnamon in her turkey chili, says it tastes like a fall candle someone dropped meat in. When she leans in to point out the guy in the cowboy hat who’d been hitting on her all afternoon, her shoulder presses firm against his bicep, her breath smells like peach hard seltzer and spearmint gum, and he feels a jolt low in his gut he hasn’t felt since he was in his 30s.
The voice in the back of his head is loud, the one he’s listened to for 18 years: this is a bad idea. Your ex will find out, she’ll call you a creep, she’ll spread rumors all over town that you went after her cousin out of spite. But then she reaches for a napkin on the table behind him, her hand brushing the side of his neck as she stretches, and he can feel the callus on her index finger from holding grooming shears 10 hours a day, and the voice gets quieter. She mentions her grandma is in Florida for a knee replacement, so she’s got the entire guest house to herself for the week, no curfew, no family breathing down her neck asking when she’s going to remarry.
The cookoff wraps up as the sun dips below the river, painting the sky pink and orange, fireflies blinking to life in the trees along the bank. He wins third place, gets a $25 gift card to the hardware store he’s been going to for 30 years, and she offers to help him carry his crockpot and his folding chair back to his beat-up 2004 Ford F150 parked two blocks away. The noise of the band fades behind them, the air is cool enough now that he doesn’t sweat anymore, and when they reach the truck, she leans against the tailgate, looking up at him with her head tilted. She tells him she’d had a crush on him when she was 17, thought he was the nicest guy she’d ever met, was too shy to say anything back then, too scared her cousin would yell at her for it.
He doesn’t overthink it, for the first time in almost two decades. He reaches up, brushes a stray curl off her face, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her cheek, and she leans into the touch, her hand coming up to rest on his wrist. He asks her if she wants to come back to his place, he’d baked a peach pie that morning, had a six pack of cold IPA in the fridge, no pressure, they could just sit on the porch and watch the stars if she wanted. She grins, the same crooked grin she had when she was a kid, and says she’d like that a lot. He opens the passenger door for her, she climbs in, and when he slides into the driver’s seat a second later, she reaches across the center console, laces her calloused fingers through his.
