Manny Ruiz is 57, makes his living restoring antique maps out of the converted two-car garage behind his bungalow in West Asheville. He hasn’t voluntarily attended a community event since his wife left him for a travel blogger eight years prior, and the only reason he showed up to the fire department’s annual chili cookoff was the grand prize: a full cord of seasoned oak, enough to heat his workshop through the winter without draining his savings. His boots are caked with pine sap from clearing dead trees off his property that morning, and he’s clutching the chipped ceramic bowl he’s had since college, the one painted with a terrible illustration of a compass rose that his old roommate made for him.
The line for the library team’s booth moves slow, and he’s half considering bailing to grab a burger at the dive bar down the street until he sees who’s running the table. Lena Marlow, 42, the new head librarian who dropped off a frayed 1927 Buncombe County map for him to restore six months prior. He’s dodged her three follow-up calls and two texts, because the second he’d met her, when she’d leaned across his workbench to point out a water stain on the map’s edge, he’d had a wild, stupid urge to kiss the smudge of ink off her jaw, and he’d felt sick with guilt for weeks after. His best friend, Joe, who died two years ago, had been her high school AP history teacher, had talked about her like she was his favorite niece, had even brought her to Manny’s 50th birthday party when she was home from grad school. Manny had told himself she was off limits, that wanting anything more than a professional relationship with her was a betrayal of Joe, that he was too old, too set in his ways, too much of a hermit for someone who spent her days organizing story hours for toddlers and book clubs for retired teachers.
When he steps up to the table, the edge presses into his hip hard enough to leave a bruise, and his knee brushes hers under the rickety folding table. She’s wearing a red flannel rolled up to her elbows, chili powder smudged on her left cheek, chipped indigo nail polish on her fingers from the tie-dye craft she ran for the teen book club the week prior; he’d seen the photos on the library’s Facebook page. “Took you long enough to show up,” she says, and she grins so wide the corners of her eyes crinkle, and she doesn’t move her knee away when it stays pressed to his. She reaches for his bowl, and when their fingers brush, he feels the callus on her index finger, the one she gets from turning hundreds of book pages a day, rough and warm against his knuckle, which is scarred from a time he slipped with an X-Acto knife while restoring an 1800s sea chart.
He takes the bowl of chili from her, finds a spot at a splintered picnic table at the edge of the field, away from the noise of the bounce house and the country band playing off-key covers of 90s hits. The chili has a hint of dark chocolate and just enough habanero to make the tip of his tongue tingle, exactly the way he likes it, and he’s halfway through the bowl when she slides into the seat across from him, sets a piece of honey cornbread down next to his bowl. “Figured you’d like it,” she says, and she kicks her boots off under the table, her socked foot brushing his ankle when she gets comfortable. “I added the chocolate after you mentioned you put it in your own chili when you brought Joe to that end of season baseball cookoff back in 2017. I remembered.”
He freezes, fork halfway to his mouth, and he can feel his ears go red, the way they always do when he’s caught off guard. He’d assumed she’d forgotten that cookoff, that she’d barely paid attention to him back then, when she was 36 and fresh out of library school, and he was still moping about his ex-wife leaving. He admits he’d been dodging her calls, that he felt like an idiot for wanting to ask her out, that he thought it would be disrespectful to Joe, that he’d spent six months telling himself he was being stupid, that she’d never be interested in a guy who spent 10 hours a day hunched over old parchment with a magnifying glass, who forgot to eat lunch half the time, who still had a framed photo of his ex-wife on his kitchen counter out of habit more than anything.
She laughs, soft and low, and she leans across the table so her face is only a foot away from his, and she doesn’t look away when his eyes dart from hers to her mouth and back again. “Joe used to tell me you were the most stubborn, loyal idiot he ever met,” she says, and she taps the edge of his chipped bowl with her finger. “He also told me if I ever got the chance to date you, I shouldn’t let your dumb moral hang ups get in the way. I’ve been flirting with you since I dropped that map off. You really didn’t notice?”
He doesn’t say anything for a second, just reaches across the table, wipes the remaining smudge of chili powder off her cheek with his thumb. Her skin is soft, a little cold from the autumn wind, and she leans into the touch instead of pulling away. He asks her if she wants to come back to his shop after the cookoff, see the finished map, have a cold beer—he’s got a case of the IPA she used to drink at those baseball cookoffs stashed in his workshop fridge. She says yes before he’s even finished talking, grinning so wide he can see the little gap between her two front teeth, the same one he’d noticed when she was at his 50th birthday.
They stay at the cookoff another hour, he enters her chili in the voting, it wins second place, the grand prize for the firewood goes to a retired school teacher who lives three streets over from him, and he doesn’t even mind. He carries her folding chair and her cooler of leftover chili for her when they leave, their arms brushing every other step as they walk across the gravel parking lot to his beat up 2008 Tacoma, the air smelling like wood smoke and the cinnamon roasted almonds the boy scouts were selling by the entrance. He opens the passenger door for her, and when she climbs in, her hand brushes the back of his neck for half a second, warm enough to chase the last of the evening chill off his skin.
