Manny Rocha is 62, a retired border patrol canine handler with thick forearms crisscrossed with old scratch scars from his last K9 partner, Zorro, a German Shepherd who passed three years back. His biggest flaw is that he’s spent the eight years since his wife Elaina died of ovarian cancer acting like gruff solitude is a personality trait instead of a defense mechanism, turning down every blind date his sister sets up, every group cookout invite from his VFW buddies, insisting he likes his routine of fixing up 1970s CJ-5 Jeeps in his garage and re-reading the same tattered 1964 Western paperback *Rider of the Rio* before bed each night.
The tiny Arizona border town he moved to after retirement runs a weekly fish fry at the VFW post every Friday, all catfish breaded in cornmeal, coleslaw tangy with pickle brine, sweet tea so sugary it makes your teeth ache just smelling it. Manny’s usually first in line, but this week he’s running late, held up by a stuck carburetor on a Jeep he’s restoring for a teen down the street, so the line’s already wrapped around the side of the building when he shows up, boots dusted with red desert sand.
He’s halfway through his plate, leaning against a splintered wooden picnic table, when a group of teens on ATVs tear past the parking lot edge, kicking up a cloud of dust that makes everyone cough, and someone jostles his elbow hard enough that a dollop of tartar sauce plops right onto the thigh of a woman standing half a foot away. She’s wearing high-waisted jeans and a linen shirt printed with tiny saguaros, and he recognizes her immediately: Clara Bennett, the new town librarian who pulled *Rider of the Rio* from the library’s local authors display last month, calling it “outdated and disrespectful to Mexican ranching communities.” Manny had marched down to the library two days later to argue, half furious she’d banned his favorite book, half flustered when he walked in and found her perched on the front desk, legs crossed, eating a churro, asking him if he’d actually read the parts where the rancher’s daughter calls the white protagonist out for being a reckless idiot.
He opens his mouth to apologize, already braced for her to snap, but she just snorts, swiping at the tartar sauce with the back of her hand and smearing it a little wider. The jasmine perfume she’s wearing mixes with the smell of fried fish and desert sage, sharp and sweet, and when she steps closer to grab a handful of napkins off the table beside him, her shoulder brushes his bicep, warm through the thin cotton of his work shirt. She holds his eye contact for three full beats, no smile at first, just a little lift of her eyebrow, before dabbing at the sauce on her jeans. “Figured you’d be the one to cover me in condiments,” she says, and he blinks, confused, until she nods at the tattered copy of *Rider of the Rio* sticking out of his back jeans pocket. “I re-read it, by the way. You were right. The ban was stupid. The dynamic between the two leads is way more layered than I gave it credit for. I put it back on display yesterday, front and center.”
Manny’s buddies are watching from the picnic table ten feet away, nudging each other and snickering, and he feels his neck heat up, a sensation he hasn’t had since he was a teen sneaking into drive-in movies with Elaina. He’s supposed to still be mad at her, supposed to hold a grudge like the rest of the old guys at the VFW who’ve been complaining about the “woke librarian” for weeks, but all he can focus on is the ink stain on the pad of her left thumb from stamping library books, the way her hair is half pulled back, a few loose strands sticking to her neck from the 90-degree heat. When she hands him a napkin to wipe tartar sauce off his own wrist, her fingers brush his, soft against the calluses on his knuckles from turning wrenches all day, and he doesn’t pull away.
They stand there for 20 minutes, talking over the twang of country music playing from the VFW speakers, the clink of beer bottles, kids screaming as they chase each other around the parking lot. She tells him she moved to town three months ago from Portland, sick of the rain, sick of entitled college students complaining about late fees, wanting somewhere quiet where she could hike on weekends. He tells her about Zorro, about fixing Jeeps, about how Elaina used to love coming to fish fries just like this when they were first married, living in a tiny trailer outside of Yuma. He doesn’t mean to say that last part, doesn’t usually talk about Elaina to strangers, but it slips out, and she doesn’t look at him like he’s broken, just nods, says her mom passed from breast cancer five years back, she knows what it’s like to feel like you’re not allowed to have fun anymore.
When the sun starts to dip low, painting the sky pale pink and tangerine, she tilts her head toward the desert trailhead at the edge of the parking lot, the one that leads up to a bluff where all the saguaros are blooming right now, white flowers glowing in the golden hour light. “I’ve been meaning to drive up there and watch the sunset all week,” she says, picking at a loose thread on her shirt, not quite meeting his eye for the first time all night. “Don’t really want to go alone. You got time?”
Manny hesitates for half a second, thinking about the half-finished carburetor waiting for him in his garage, the copy of *Rider of the Rio* he planned to read on his porch tonight, the stupid little rule he made for himself eight years ago that he wouldn’t go anywhere alone with a woman that wasn’t family. Then he looks at her, at the faint smudge of tartar sauce still on the knee of her jeans, the way she’s biting the corner of her lip waiting for his answer, and he nods, grabbing his keys out of his pocket.
His old CJ-5 rumbles down the dirt road leading up to the bluff, dust kicking up behind them, and she rolls the window all the way down, leaning her arm out, laughing when a gust of wind blows her hair all over her face. He parks right at the edge, where you can see the whole town spread out below, saguaros dotted across the desert floor, their flowers glowing bright as the sun dips below the horizon. She sits down on the Jeep’s hood next to him, and after a minute, she leans her shoulder against his, warm and solid, and he doesn’t move away. Somewhere down below, a coyote yowls, and she laces her fingers through his, her hand soft in his, calloused at the edges from turning thousands of book pages.
