Manny Ruiz, 53, spent 22 years as a power lineman before a 2019 fall shattered his left ankle and forced early retirement. He now runs a 12-acre Fraser fir farm 10 miles outside Asheville, North Carolina, and has perfected the art of dodging small talk at local community events. He’s at the late October chili cookoff only to pick up the third-place plaque for his brisket and habanero entry, already mentally mapping the fence line he needs to repair first thing the next morning. He leans against a splintered pine picnic table, sipping a hazy IPA from a plastic cup, work boots crusted with pine sap and thin mud from that morning’s tree trimming. The air smells like wood smoke, charred meat, and the last of the fall marigolds planted along the fairground fence.
A woman he doesn’t recognize steps into his line of sight, holding a paper bowl of pale white chili, napkin tucked into the collar of her puffer vest. He’s seen her around town the last few months, behind the desk at the tiny public library branch, but they’ve never spoken. She leans in to be heard over the bluegrass trio playing on the small stage, her wool-covered shoulder brushing the bare skin of his bicep where his flannel sleeve is rolled up, and he catches a whiff of vanilla lotion and lemon Pledge, like she’d been dusting library shelves right before she showed up. “You’re Manny, right? The guy who sells the firs that don’t drop needles for six weeks?” she shouts, loud enough that the old couple next to them glance over. Her fingernails are painted chipped forest green, like she’d been painting a bookshelf midday and didn’t have time to fix the smudges.
His first instinct is to brush her off. For the last eight years, ever since his ex-wife left him for a real estate developer who tried to condemn his farm for a subdivision, every time a stranger asks about his trees, he assumes they want a free handout or to sweet-talk their way into using his private land for parties or photoshoots. He opens his mouth to say he only sells to pre-vetted regulars, no donations, no exceptions, but she holds out a plastic spoonful of her chili before he can speak. “Try it. White chicken, extra jalapeño. I won first place in the non-red category.” He takes the bite without thinking, the heat searing the back of his throat so hard he coughs, eyes watering. She laughs, a low, throaty sound, and pulls a peppermint candy from her coat pocket, holding it out between her thumb and index finger. His knuckles brush hers when he takes it, and the contact sends a jolt up his arm he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager asking a girl to prom.
He sucks on the peppermint, the cool sweetness cutting through the chili burn, as she rambles about the library’s holiday story hour, how the kids make pinecone ornaments every year, how last year’s tree died two weeks before Christmas and left half the 4-year-olds crying. She doesn’t ask for a free tree, he realizes, when she gets to the point: she’s renting a tiny cottage on the edge of town, has a patch of yard she wants to plant two small firs in, and she can’t figure out how to prune them so they don’t grow lopsided. She offers to pay him his regular hourly rate for a two-hour lesson that weekend, plus bring him a batch of that chili every week through December if he’s open to it. He feels stupid for his earlier assumption, his neck warming under the collar of his flannel.
He agrees, tells her 10 a.m. Saturday is fine, no need to pay him, the chili is more than enough. She grins, the corner of her mouth crinkling like she’s holding back a smarter comment, and steps a little closer, the toe of her boot almost touching his. “Everyone in town said you were a hermit who hates talking to anyone,” she says, tilting her head, gray streaks in her brown hair catching the golden sunset light. “Guess they were wrong.” He holds her gaze for three beats longer than polite, doesn’t look away when he sees her cheeks flush pink, the wind blowing a strand of hair across her face that she tucks behind her ear slow, like she’s making a show of it.
She scribbles her number on the back of a chili cookoff entry form, presses it into his palm along with the leftover half of her chili bowl, then waves and heads off to help the other volunteers fold up tables. He stands there for another ten minutes, holding the crumpled paper and the warm bowl, the peppermint candy wrapper crinkling in his jeans pocket. When he gets in his beat-up Ford F-150, he turns the key, the heater blowing warm air that smells like pine needles and old fast food wrappers. He pulls out his phone to text her his address, and his hands are a little shaky, the same steady, adrenaline-fueled shake he used to get after climbing a 60-foot utility pole in a thunderstorm and making it down in one piece. The bluegrass band is playing a slow cover of Folsom Prison Blues as he pulls out of the fairground parking lot, and he rolls the window down an inch so he can hear it over the rattle of the truck’s exhaust, the cool fall air stinging his cheeks, still warm from where she stood so close.
