Rico Marquez is 57, has made a living restoring vintage Airstreams for 12 years, ever since he walked away from a corporate sales job the week his wife served him divorce papers. He’s spent the better part of a decade cultivating a deliberate kind of invisibility, turning down invitations to neighborhood barbecues, avoiding the local watering hole on weekends, telling himself he likes the quiet of his barn workshop more than he likes people. He only agreed to set up a booth at the town’s summer street fair because the organizer owed him a 30% discount on a new welding rig, not because he wanted to spend three days surrounded by screaming kids hopped up on cotton candy and retirees badgering him about how much a full Airstream reno costs.
The salsa booth gets set up next to his at 7 a.m. the first day, before the crowds roll in. He’s tightening a hinge on the 1972 Bambi he’s got on display when he hears a voice, warm and rough around the edges, ask if he’s got a bottle opener she can borrow. He turns, and he recognizes her immediately: Lila Carter, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one who used to show up to Thanksgiving dinners barefoot with a jar of homemade moonshine, who once told him at a family wedding that his sales job was slowly sucking the soul out of him when he was still married and too dumb to see it. He fumbles the screwdriver he’s holding, catches it against his steel-toe work boot, and digs an opener out of his tool belt. When he hands it to her, her forearm brushes his, sun-warmed, dusted with a fine layer of chili powder, and he smells coconut sunscreen and fresh cilantro rolling off her like a fog. She holds eye contact for two beats longer than she should, smirks, and says she owes him a free sample when she’s set up.
He tells himself he’s not going to take her up on it. For 20 years, Lila was off-limits, a line he didn’t even consider crossing, not even when his marriage was so cold he and his ex slept in separate bedrooms half the year. He’d spent too long thinking of her as family, even after the divorce, even after his ex remarried and moved to Florida and never called him again. The idea of wanting anything from her makes his chest tight, half shame at breaking an unspoken rule, half a sharp, hungry heat he hasn’t felt in years. He spends the next three hours pretending he doesn’t glance over at her booth every five minutes, watching her laugh as she hands out samples, watching the way her sun-bleached blonde hair sticks to the back of her neck when the temperature hits 92 degrees.
He caves at 11 a.m., when the line at her booth dies down. He walks over, scuffs his boot in the dust, and says he’s here to collect that sample. She grins, hands him a small plastic cup of mango habanero salsa, and their fingers brush when he takes it. The salsa burns going down, sweet and sharp, and he coughs a little, which makes her laugh so hard she snorts. They talk for 20 minutes, about the Airstream, about her small organic farm on the edge of town, about how the fair’s corn dogs are so greasy they could probably power a pickup truck. He learns she moved back to town two years ago, after a decade working on organic farms in Oregon, that she’s never been married, that she thinks most people their age are boring as hell because all they talk about is grandkids and blood pressure meds. He finds himself telling her about the old John Wayne westerns he watches every night, about how he once restored an Airstream for a guy who drove it all the way to Alaska, about how he hasn’t been on a date in eight years. He doesn’t even realize he’s oversharing until a group of kids runs between their booths, screaming, and he checks his watch and sees he’s spent 45 minutes standing there, ignoring the people stopping to look at his Bambi.
He avoids her for the rest of the day, mad at himself for being stupid, for letting a pretty woman with a good salsa recipe rattle him. He tells himself he’s too old for this, too set in his ways, that messing around with his ex’s cousin is just asking for drama he doesn’t need. The storm rolls in at 6 p.m., out of nowhere, dark clouds dumping cold rain so hard it stings exposed skin. The fair organizers yell that everyone needs to pack up immediately, and he watches Lila struggle to lift a heavy cooler of salsa into the bed of her beat-up Ford F150, her flannel shirt soaked through, sticking to her shoulders. He doesn’t think before he walks over, grabs the other end of the cooler, and hefts it into the truck for her. She thanks him, water dripping off her eyelashes, and asks if he wants to follow her back to her farm, dry off, have a beer, maybe eat some more salsa.
He hesitates for three full seconds, every old, stupid rule screaming in his head that he should say no, that he should go home to his empty barn and his cold Modelo and his old westerns. Then he looks at her, the smudge of chili powder still on her left cheek, her grin a little shy like she doesn’t think he’ll say yes, and he nods. He locks up his booth, follows her down the two-lane highway out of town, rain streaking his windshield, his heart beating faster than it has since he was a teenager sneaking out of his parents’ house. Her farm is small, cluttered with tomato plants and squawking chicken coops, and she leads him onto her covered porch, hands him a frayed cotton towel, and disappears inside to grab beer and salsa.
She sits down next to him on the porch swing, close enough that their knees brush when she shifts, and sets a bowl of salsa and a six pack of Modelo between them. The rain taps against the porch roof, distant thunder rumbles over the foothills, and she reaches up, brushes a stray drop of rain off his jaw, her thumb lingering on his skin for half a second. He doesn’t pull away. He leans in, kisses her slow, the taste of mango and chili still on her tongue, no rush, no pressure, no stupid unspoken rules hanging over either of them. He picks up a tortilla chip, dips it into the bowl between them, and lets the sharp, sweet heat of the salsa burn away the last of his stupid, long-held reservations.
