He was picking at a loose splinter on the table edge when a shadow fell over his half-drunk Coors. He looked up. She was mid-50s, had a thick streak of silver running through her dark auburn braid, wore a faded flannel shirt rolled to the elbows and scuffed white sneakers, a county library lanyard strung with cartoon cat keychains around her neck. “You’re the guy who made the green chili with the hatch peppers trucked in from New Mexico, right?” she said, holding up an empty paper bowl. “Everyone’s been raving about it. I’ve been working my way down every table, and none of the red stuff has hit the spice threshold yet.”
He nodded, pushed the crockpot a little closer across the splintered wood. “Be careful. I put enough cayenne in it to clear a two-week sinus infection.” Their knuckles brushed when he handed her a flimsy plastic spoon, and he felt a little jolt go up his arm, the kind he hadn’t felt since he was 17 asking a girl to dance at the Union County fair. She smelled like vanilla lip balm and the lemon polish she used on library shelves, he realized, when she leaned in to scoop a heaping spoonful. She took a bite, her hazel eyes widening, then snorted a little, coughing into her elbow. “You weren’t kidding,” she said, laughing, wiping a stray tear from the corner of her eye. “Worth it, though. I’m Clara. Took over as county librarian three months ago, moved here from Missoula.”
He told her his name, braced for the usual sad little nod people gave when they heard Oliveira, the one that came with remembering Elaina, his wife, the elementary school teacher who’d coached the 4H sewing club for 12 years before she died of breast cancer 8 years prior. But Clara just nodded, sat down on the bench next to him, close enough that their jeans brushed at the knees when she shifted. “I know who you are,” she said. “You restored that 1958 Shasta parked out in front of the bookstore on Main, right? The sky blue with the white trim? I stop and stare at it every morning on my walk to work. That paint job is flawless.”
Rafe tensed a little, that old familiar conflict kicking in. Half of him wanted to gush about the Shasta, the three months he spent stripping rust, tracking down original chrome light fixtures from a junkyard outside Boise. The other half wanted to grab his crockpot and bolt for his truck, escape the weird flutter in his chest, the stupid, sharp guilt that came with enjoying talking to a woman who wasn’t Elaina. He’d spent 8 years telling himself he was too old for this, that flirting at a chili cookoff was silly nonsense for guys half his age, that he didn’t deserve to feel light again.
But Clara didn’t push. She just ate her chili, pointed out the fire chief in a neon cowboy hat doing a terrible line dance to “Friends in Low Places,” and asked him about the hardest trailer he’d ever restored. He told her about the 1962 Airstream he’d dragged out of a field outside Pendleton, the one that had a family of raccoons living in the bathroom, and she laughed so hard she spilled a dot of chili on her flannel sleeve. She leaned in to look at the photos he pulled up on his beat-up iPhone, her hand brushing his wrist when she tapped the screen to zoom in on the custom walnut cabinetry he’d built, and he could feel the callus on her index finger, the kind you get from turning thousands of book pages over decades.
The emcee got on the mic then, yelling that it was time for the 50/50 raffle drawing. Rafe had stuffed his ticket in his jeans pocket an hour before, forgotten all about it. He didn’t even look up until Clara elbowed him in the ribs, grinning. “That’s your number,” she said. “Last four 7291? I saw you crumple it up when you bought it.”
He pulled it out, sure she was messing with him, but she was right. He walked up to the stage, took the thick manila envelope full of cash, the fire chief clapping him on the back and saying he owed the chili all the credit. When he got back to the table, he counted the cash: 420 dollars even. He split it in half, held out a stack of bills to her. “You’re my good luck charm, actually. Wanna put this toward a drink at that new natural wine bar on Main? I heard they have that sour cherry ale you said you’ve been wanting to try.” He held his breath, half expecting her to say no, half expecting that old guilt to swallow him whole before she could answer.
Clara took the cash, slipped it in her jeans pocket, then stood up, slinging her canvas library bag slung with used book sale patches over her shoulder. “Only if you promise to drop a jar of that green chili off at the library tomorrow before noon,” she said. “I’ve got a stack of Louis L’Amour novels to get through this weekend, and that chili’s the only thing that’ll make the cold rain they’re forecasting bearable.”
He grabbed his crockpot, his half-empty beer, and followed her through the dispersing crowd, the sun dipping low over the wheat fields to the west, painting the sky pink and tangerine. The silver streak in her braid caught the sunset light, glowing like the polished aluminum panels he spent hours buffing to a shine. Their shoulders brushed every other step, and he could still feel the ghost of her hand on his wrist, warm and calloused and real. A gust of wind blew a handful of maple leaves across their path, and she laughed, kicking one into the road ahead of them.
