Rafe Mendez, 61, spent 34 years restoring vintage Japanese and American motorcycles out of his cinder block shop in East Austin before selling it last spring, and he still hasn’t figured out what to do with all the empty hours. His biggest flaw is stubbornness: he refused to hire help even when his arthritis got so bad he could barely grip a socket wrench, refused to retire even after his wife’s cancer made her too sick to leave the house most days, and refused every single one of his sister’s attempts to drag him to “senior social events” for eight full years after his wife passed. He only agreed to come to the neighborhood summer food truck festival because his sister threatened to drop off her three unruly golden retrievers at his house for a week while she went on a cruise.
He was 10 seconds from slipping out to his beat-up Ford F150 and heading home to the half-restored 1972 Kawasaki H2 he kept in his garage when they both reached for the last smoked brisket taco on the counter at the Tex-Mex truck. Their hands brushed. Rafe’s were crisscrossed with faint scars from welding burns and scuffed with old grease he never could fully scrub out, hers soft, with a smudge of navy ink on the index finger knuckle and a tiny silver stack of rings shaped like oak leaves. He pulled his hand back like he’d touched a hot exhaust pipe, and then he looked up and recognized her.
Lena Voss, his late wife’s second cousin, the one who’d moved to town three months prior to run the branch library two blocks from his house. He’d seen her through the window of his usual coffee shop a handful of times, always with a stack of hold slips tucked under her arm, always looking like she was half-amused by whatever she was reading. His wife had laughed about her once, back when they were still in their 20s, saying Lena used to doodle Rafe’s name on the back of her textbook covers when the whole extended family came over for Fourth of July cookouts. The memory pricked him, hot and guilty, like he was doing something wrong just standing that close to her.
The crowd pressed in around them, the mariachi band two stalls over blaring a raucous cover of a Johnny Cash song, the smell of cedar smoke and grilled corn and pickled jalapeños thick in the humid Austin air. They ended up pressed shoulder to shoulder while they waited for the taco line to reset, and Rafe could smell jasmine perfume mixed with the faint, sweet scent of peppermint gum on her breath when she turned to talk to him. She didn’t mention his wife first. She asked about the Kawasaki he was rebuilding, said his sister had rambled about it for 20 minutes when she’d signed up for a library card back in May.
He tried to make a polite excuse to leave, but his mouth kept moving before his brain could catch up, telling her about the trouble he was having tracking down an original carburetor, about how he’d ridden a similar H2 back when he was 19, had crashed it into a ditch outside of San Marcos after a Willie Nelson concert. She laughed, loud and unselfconscious, and told him she’d raced dirt bikes through the hill country when she was a teen, had broken her wrist three times trying to pull off jumps she had no business attempting.
They grabbed a pair of cold Modelos and walked down to the tree line at the edge of the park, sat on a fallen oak log that overlooked the shallow, muddy creek. She leaned in to point out a blue heron wading in the shallows, and her arm brushed his, and he didn’t pull away. He felt that tight, warm tug low in his chest that he’d thought was gone for good, fought back the voice in his head screaming that he was betraying the woman he’d been married to for 30 years. Then he remembered the last thing his wife had said to him, two days before she died, half-delirious from pain meds, squeezing his hand so tight her nails dug into his skin: Stop moping, you idiot. You get to be happy too.
When she turned to look at him, her face half-shadowed by the oak leaves, her eyes glinting in the golden hour light, he didn’t hesitate. He kissed her, slow, the salt of the taco he’d just eaten still on his tongue, the cold of the beer can still seeping into his palm. She kissed him back, one hand coming up to rest lightly on his jaw, and he didn’t feel guilty anymore. He felt alive.
They talked until the sun dipped below the horizon, until the food trucks started packing up, until the mariachi band packed up their instruments and left. He walked her to her tiny pale blue Prius parked at the edge of the lot, and she squeezed his calloused hand before she climbed in, told him she’d bring over the old motorcycle repair manuals she’d found at a library book sale the week prior if he wanted. He asked her to stay for dinner tomorrow, said he’d grill ribs and make potato salad the way his wife used to teach him. She said yes.
He stood in the gravel lot for five minutes after she pulled out, watching her taillights fade down the street, the crickets starting to chirp in the grass around him, the leftover taco in his hand gone cold. He took a bite, wiped a smudge of barbacoa grease off his chin with the back of his hand, and smiled.
