Ray Ruiz, 62, retired Border Patrol K9 handler, leaned against the dented passenger side of his 2008 Silverado and sipped lukewarm sweet tea. He’d entered his red hatch green chili in the annual Pecos County cookoff for 12 straight years, won three of the last four, and had planned to grab his prize and bolt before the line dancing started. Small town events meant small town gossip, and he’d spent the 8 years since his wife Elena died doing everything he could to stay off the rumor mill. He wore a faded flannel over a well-worn Border Patrol t-shirt, work boots caked in caliche dust, and kept his left hand in his pocket at all times, twisting the worn silver wedding band he’d never taken off.
The crowd swarmed around him, kids darting between lawn chairs with cotton candy stuck to their cheeks, old men arguing about bean vs no-bean chili, a cover band fumbling through a George Strait deep cut in the background. He was halfway to finishing his tea when a woman tripped over a toddler’s plastic lawn chair at his feet and slammed shoulder-first into his chest. His tea sloshed over the rim of the styrofoam cup, splattering the front of her faded Carhartt overalls.
She stumbled back, holding a stack of crumpled score sheets over her head to keep from dropping them, and laughed instead of apologizing. The sound was rough, warm, like she spent half her time yelling over wind and farm equipment. “You gonna stand there like a concrete post all afternoon, or you gonna warn people when you’re parked right in the middle of the walkway?” She was 58, he guessed, gray streaks pulled back in a messy braid, a thin scar slicing across her left knuckle, lips chapped from the West Texas wind. She smelled like lime seltzer and dried sage, the same scent Elena used to burn in their kitchen when the desert wind brought in dust storms.
Ray’s first instinct was to grumble, hand her a napkin, and walk away. Then he saw his name scrawled on the top score sheet in her messy cursive, a 9.8 circled in red pen, a note scribbled in the margins: *Almost perfect. Needs more roasted garlic.* He blinked. That was the exact line Elena had teased him with every single time he made chili for their anniversary. “You’re the new extension agent?” he said, nodding at the embroidered name tag on her overalls. He’d heard the old guys at the hardware store talking about her, the woman who’d moved out from Albuquerque to run the county’s small farm program, widowed same as him, didn’t take crap from anyone.
She leaned in a little, close enough that he could feel the heat of her arm through his flannel sleeve when she pointed at the tent three rows over. “That’s Manny’s tent. He’s been cheating for three years, buys that pre-made chili base from the grocery store in Fort Stockton and swears it’s his abuela’s recipe. I docked him two points for lying. Your chili’s the only one in the whole contest that doesn’t taste like canned tomato sauce and regret.” Her elbow brushed his bicep when she laughed again, and he didn’t move away. He hadn’t talked to anyone for more than 10 minutes at a public event in years, hadn’t let anyone stand that close to him without feeling a sharp twist of guilt, like he was doing something wrong.
He told her about his old K9 partner, Boss, the German shepherd who’d worked with him for 7 years, retired the same time he did, passed two years earlier. He told her about the way Boss would steal bites of his chili off the counter when he wasn’t looking, how Elena used to slip him extra pieces of carne asada when Ray wasn’t watching. She told him about the 10 acre lavender farm she’d run outside Albuquerque before she moved, how her husband had died in a tractor accident 6 years earlier, how she’d moved out to West Texas because she couldn’t stand walking past the empty fields every morning.
The emcee yelled his name over the loudspeaker a half hour later, announcing he’d won first place, the $500 prize, and the custom hand-tooled leather belt buckle that came with it. He walked up to get the award, could feel half the crowd staring, knew they were already whispering about who he’d been talking to for the last hour. When he turned back to the Silverado, she was leaning against the fender, holding a mason jar full of roasted garlic cloves, grinning. “For next year’s batch,” she said, holding it out.
He reached out to take it, and their fingers brushed for three full seconds, callus on her index finger catching on the rough skin of his knuckle. He didn’t pull away. Some guy from the hardware store yelled across the parking lot, “Hey Ray, you finally gonna stop moping and ask that lady out?” Ray felt his face heat up, the way it hadn’t since he was a teenager asking Elena to prom. He didn’t yell back, didn’t step away, didn’t make some excuse about having to get home to his empty house. “You like cold beer and bad jukeboxes?” he asked, nodding at the dive bar three miles down the highway.
