Javier Mendez is 57, a vintage motorcycle restorer who runs his shop out of a cinder block garage in east Austin, and he hasn’t willingly gone to a family gathering in 7 years. Stubborn to a fault, he’s spent the better part of a decade clinging to arbitrary rules he wrote for himself after his wife left him for a commercial real estate broker: no dating anyone who knows his ex, no drinking before 7 PM, no letting anyone stay the night at his place. His daughter, a med student in San Antonio, has called him a stubborn old mule no less than 12 times in the last year, so when the Lockhart Chili Cookoff called asking if he wanted a booth to sell his custom hand-tooled leather seat covers, he said yes just to prove he could leave the shop for more than an hour.
The first two days are uneventful. He sells a dozen seats, eats enough chili to give him heartburn for a week, avoids the handful of distant cousins who wander past his booth. Mid-afternoon on the third day, he’s bent over adjusting a display of leather keychains when he smells habanero and citrus, sharp enough to cut through the thick cloud of smoked brisket and chili powder hanging over the fairgrounds. He looks up, and Elara Ruiz is leaning against the metal pole of his booth, worn cowboy boots crossed at the ankle, a half-eaten cup of green chili in one hand, a smirk playing on her lips. She’s his ex-wife’s younger cousin, 49, the one who used to slip him extra beer at family barbecues when his ex wasn’t looking, the one he’d spent 15 years of marriage pretending he didn’t think was the funniest, prettiest woman in any room she walked into. He hasn’t seen her since his divorce was finalized.
She pushes off the pole and steps closer, just as a group of kids on scooters come tearing between the booths, and her shoulder brushes his bicep. He can smell coconut sunscreen under the chili smoke, and the silver streak running through the front of her dark hair catches the sun so bright he has to blink a few times to focus. “Told you you’d end up selling overpriced leather crap out of a folding table one day,” she says, and her voice is the same low, rough drawl he remembers from the night he got drunk at her sister’s wedding and sang Selena off-key while she filmed him. She runs a hot sauce brand out of a small farm outside San Marcos, her booth is three down from his, she’s divorced three years, she says, when they’re standing next to each other sampling her ghost pepper blend an hour later. The burn of the sauce sits on his tongue long after he swallows, and when their fingers brush reaching for the same paper towel to wipe up a spilled sample, he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned.
He’s furious with himself for the next two hours. He shouldn’t be talking to her. She’s family, sort of, even if his ex hasn’t spoken to her in four years over a fight about an inherited lake house. He shouldn’t be noticing how her jeans fit just right, how she laughs so hard she snorts when he tells her about the time a customer brought in a 1972 Honda CB750 that had a family of raccoons living in the gas tank. He shouldn’t be leaning in so close when she talks that he can smell the mint gum she’s chewing, that he can count the tiny freckles across her nose he never noticed back when he was married.
Dusk falls fast, the air cooling just enough to take the edge off the Texas heat. Most of the crowds have cleared out, the mariachi band that played all afternoon has packed up their instruments, the only sounds left are the clink of beer bottles from the beer garden and the crinkle of plastic as vendors pack up their booths. Elara shows up at his booth holding two cold Shiner Bocks, passes him one, and leans against the table next to him. Her knee brushes his, and he doesn’t move away this time. She says she got a room at the tiny motel on the edge of town, she doesn’t have to drive back to San Marcos until tomorrow, no pressure, no awkward family drama, no strings, if he wants to come over and finish the six pack she has in her cooler.
He hesitates for 17 full seconds, counting, all the stupid rules he’s lived by for the last 8 years bouncing around his head. Then he nods. He finishes packing up his booth while she loads hers into her beat-up Ford F-150, and when they walk across the gravel parking lot toward the motel, her hand brushes his every few steps. He tucks the jar of her special reserve hot sauce, labeled “For the guy who always liked it too hot” in messy black marker, into the pocket of his oil-stained work jacket, and when she laces her fingers through his as they cross the street, he doesn’t let go.
