Javier Mendez, 52, had made custom cowboy boots for everyone from Austin country singers to West Texas ranch hands for 22 years, and he’d avoided the Travis County Fair boot contest for exactly 8 of them. The last time he’d entered, his wife of 10 years had left him for a rodeo clown she’d met backstage at the event, and he’d sworn off anything that smelled like fried dough and off-key line dancing ever since. His 17-year-old niece, who’d been working in his shop part time since she was 14, had begged him for three months straight to enter this year, said his chestnut ostrich pair tooled with bluebonnets and cacti was too good to keep locked up in the back of his workshop, and he’d finally caved, if only to get her to stop leaving sticky notes with terrible boot puns on his workbench.
He’s leaning against the rough pine frame of his booth when she walks over, and his throat goes dry before he even places her. She’s got auburn hair streaked with silver pulled back in a messy braid, a faded Willie Nelson t-shirt stretched tight over her shoulders, and a smudge of deep purple blackberry jam on the inside of her left wrist. It takes him three full seconds to recognize her as Lila, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one who’d been 19 and too loud and too pretty at his wedding, the one he’d caught himself staring at more than once when he’d still been married, the one he’d deliberately avoided at every family function for a decade. She runs the jam booth two spots down from his, he realizes, and he’d somehow missed it when he set up that morning.
She leans over the edge of his booth, elbows propped on the wood, and she’s so close he can smell lavender perfume mixed with the sweet, tart scent of cooked fruit clinging to her shirt. “Javier Mendez. I knew you’d show up one of these years,” she says, grinning, and her teeth are crooked at the corner, just like he remembers. He doesn’t say anything at first, just nods, because the last time he spoke to her was at his ex-wife’s birthday party in 2014, right before everything fell apart, and he’d always felt like she was off limits, even long after the divorce papers were signed. Half the town still talks about how messy the split was, how he’d thrown all his ex’s stuff out on the front lawn and told her entire family to never darken his door again. Lila doesn’t seem to care, though, she reaches out to run a finger along the intricate cactus stitching on the side of the ostrich boots he’d entered, and her knuckle brushes his where he’s resting his hand on the boot’s toe. The contact is light, accidental, but it sends a jolt up his arm, the kind he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager fumbling with a girl in the back of his dad’s beat-up Ford pickup. He flinches, and she laughs, soft, not mean. “Relax. I’m not gonna bite. Unless you ask.”
He’s torn. Part of him wants to tell her to go back to her booth, to keep the careful distance he’s built for 8 years, to not risk the snickering gossip that’ll spread through town before the sun sets if anyone sees them talking. The other part of him can’t stop staring at the jam smudge on her wrist, at the way her eyes crinkle when she laughs, at the way she’s not treating him like the bitter, closed off guy everyone in town thinks he is. She tells him she’s been making jam full time since she quit her elementary school teaching job 5 years ago, that she enters the fair canning contest every year and always takes second place to the 82-year-old lady who makes pickled okra so spicy it makes grown men cry, that she’s been coming to the fair every year since he stopped entering, half hoping he’d show up eventually. “I always thought you got a raw deal,” she says, quiet, so no one passing by can hear. “She never deserved how hard you worked for her.” No one’s ever said that to him, not even his own family, everyone always took his ex’s side because she was the fun one, the one who danced on bar tops and told dirty jokes at cookouts.
He opens his mouth to say no, to make up an excuse about having to pack up his booth early, about having to get back to the shop to finish an order for a rancher out in Fredericksburg, but then he looks at her, grinning, waiting, and he can’t. “Yeah,” he says, before he can talk himself out of it. “That sounds good.” She grins wider, leans in a little, wipes a smudge of jam off the corner of his chin with her thumb, and the contact burns, in the best possible way. She says she’ll save him a spot by the shaded picnic tables, then turns and walks back to her booth, braid swinging behind her. The announcer from the boot contest walks up to his booth a minute later, hands him a crinkled blue first place ribbon, says the judges loved his stitching, but Javier barely hears him. He tucks the jam jar under his arm, hangs the blue ribbon on the edge of the booth without even glancing at it, already counting down the minutes until he can meet her.
