Ronny Prakash, 62, retired air traffic controller from Cleveland, has spent the last three years in his Asheville bungalow avoiding any gathering where his ex-wife might show up. It’s a stupid grudge, one he can’t shake even 18 years after she emptied their joint savings and ran off with a regional airline pilot, but it’s kept his evenings quiet, his schedule free to fix vintage CB radios he picks up at flea markets. He only agreed to judge the fall neighborhood chili cook-off because his next-door neighbor, a retired teacher named Marnie, brought him peach pie for three straight nights to beg, and he’d confirmed twice that his ex was in Pensacola visiting her sister for the month.
He leans against a splintered pine picnic table sipping sweet tea, the air thick with cumin, hickory smoke, and the sharp, bright tang of fermented hot sauce. The crowd’s a mix of retirees in puffy vests, young parents chasing toddlers covered in chili dust, and a handful of local shop owners hawking jams and knit scarves. He spots her across the tent first, braid streaked with silver slung over one shoulder, flannel unbuttoned over a faded Led Zeppelin tee, jeans cuffed over scuffed work boots, wiping a smudge of red chili off her cheek with the back of her hand. The name on her contestant lanyard makes his jaw tight: Maren Hale. His ex’s first cousin, the one he’d met once at their wedding 25 years prior, when she’d been 23 and got kicked out of the reception for lighting a sparkler in the ballroom.
His first instinct is to leave. He’d rather blow off Marnie’s pie-fueled favor than spend an hour making small talk with anyone tied to the worst year of his life. He’s already pushing off the table when she spots him, grins, and cuts through the crowd straight for him, holding two small paper sample cups in one hand. She moves like she’s in no hurry, shoulders loose, and when she stops half a foot away, close enough that he can pick up pine and clove from the hand salve she’s wearing, the resentment in his chest softens at the edges, unplanned.
“Ronny, right? You were the only guy at that wedding who didn’t make fun of me for wearing combat boots down the aisle,” she says, holding out one of the cups. Her shoulder brushes his bicep when she leans past him to set the other cup on the picnic table, and he feels a static jolt, like the shock you get touching a CB radio antenna after a storm. When he takes the cup from her, their fingers brush for half a second, her palm calloused, warm. He stares at the chili first, deep red, dotted with pinto beans and a sprinkle of cotija, before taking a sip. It’s perfect, rich, with a hint of smoked cocoa and a slow burn that lingers at the back of his throat, no cheap vinegar aftertaste.
He’s about to compliment it when the old resentment flares again, sharp. “I didn’t think any of the Hale family talked to me, after the divorce,” he says, rougher than he means to. Maren snorts, leaning back against the picnic table next to him, their thighs almost touching, close enough that he can feel the heat off her jeans through his.
“Are you kidding? I haven’t spoken to your ex in 12 years. She tried to steal my apothecary’s client list when I first opened, said I owed her for ‘family support.’ I told her to go to hell,” she says, and he laughs before he can stop himself, a loud, rough sound he hasn’t made in months. She asks about his CB radios, and he blinks, confused, until she says Marnie told her, that she’s been looking for someone to fix the old CB her dad left her when he died, the one he used in his logging truck.
They talk for 40 minutes, missing the first round of judging entirely, until Marnie comes over to yell at him, playful, holding up a stack of score sheets. Maren winks at him before she heads back to her booth, and he spends the rest of the judging half distracted, half replaying the way her shoulder pressed against his, the way she laughed at his dumb joke about the time he talked a lost private pilot through a foggy landing in Toledo.
When the awards are handed out, Maren takes second place in the hot category, carrying a dorky ceramic trophy shaped like a chili pepper, and he finds himself walking her to her beat-up pickup truck parked at the edge of the park, no plan, no thought of the grudge he’s carried for almost two decades. The sun’s dipping low, painting the sky pink and orange, the air cool enough that he can see his breath when he exhales. She stops at her tailgate, leaning against it, and reaches into her cooler to hand him a jar of her homemade hot sauce, the label hand-doodled with little pine trees. When he takes it from her, she doesn’t pull her hand away right away, their fingers laced loosely for three full beats, no talking, the distant noise of the cook-off fading to a low hum. He doesn’t care if any of the neighbors see them, if someone runs their mouth to his ex if she ever comes back to town. All he can think about is how her eyes are dark, warm, how she didn’t ask a single prying question about the divorce, how she actually cared when he rambled about the 1970s CB he was restoring for a kid down the street.
He asks her if she wants to come back to his place to test the hot sauce on the venison sausage he smoked last weekend, and she nods, grinning, tossing her chili trophy into the passenger seat of her truck. She leans up to brush a dry oak leaf off his collar, her thumb grazing his jaw for half a second, calloused, warm, the same static jolt running up his spine. He opens the passenger door of his old Ford F-150 for her, and when she climbs in, she leaves the door propped open a crack, so he can smell that pine and clove scent drifting out before he walks around to the driver’s side.
