Rudy Gallegos, 62, retired wildlife refuge manager, picked at a grease-soaked carnitas taco at the far end of the cantina’s splintered picnic table, deliberately avoiding eye contact with every regular who wandered past. He’d avoided the weekly taco night for three straight years, convinced every smile thrown his way was laced with pity for the widower who’d lost his wife Elena to ovarian cancer four years prior. His hands were crisscrossed with thin scars from 31 years of repairing bighorn sheep water lines, trimming trailside mesquite, and prying rusted cattle gates off their hinges, and he’d spent every month since retirement walling himself off on his 12-acre plot on the edge of Las Cruces, only leaving to pick up feed for his three rescue goats or restock his fridge of cheap lager. Jake, his old shift supervisor, had practically dragged him out that night, saying he’d turn into a cactus if he spent one more night alone watching 70s western reruns.
The monsoon rains had let off an hour prior, and the air smelled like creosote, roasted pork, and the faint metallic tang of wet dust kicked up by passing pickup trucks. The picnic table filled up fast, and before he could make an excuse to leave, a woman slid onto the bench next to him, close enough that her faded linen shirt brushed his bicep when she reached for the jar of roasted habanero salsa in the middle of the table. He tensed, ready to shift away, until he glanced over and saw the dried red clay crusted under her short fingernails, the faint smudge of iron oxide on her left cheekbone. She held his gaze for two beats longer than polite, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a half-smirk, and said she was Mara, the woman who’d moved into the old adobe three miles down the road from his place six weeks prior.
Their elbows brushed again when she passed him the salt shaker, and this time he didn’t flinch. She didn’t mention Elena, didn’t say she’d heard about him from the town gossip mill, didn’t offer the sad, soft smile he’d come to hate from every other local who knew his story. Instead, she asked if the arroyo cutting through the south end of his property was still running high, said she’d been scouting local clay deposits for her mobile pottery workshop, and the sediment there had just the right iron content to fire into that deep terracotta red she liked. He found himself talking before he could stop himself, explaining how the monsoons washed down basalt dust from the Organ Mountains every summer, how he’d rerouted a small section of the arroyo three years prior to keep it from eroding the fence line around his goat pasture. She leaned in as he spoke, her knee brushing his under the table, and he could smell sage and turpentine on her shirt, the faint sweetness of lime from the margarita she was sipping.
He fought the quiet, sharp guilt coiling in his chest the whole time they talked, the voice in his head screaming that he was betraying Elena by enjoying the sound of another woman’s laugh, by noticing the way the setting sun hit the silver streaks in her dark hair, by not pulling away when her hand brushed his forearm to point out a pair of roadrunners darting across the dirt parking lot. He’d spent four years telling himself he didn’t get to have nice things anymore, that the only right way to honor Elena was to stay as alone as he was the day she died. Mara didn’t push, didn’t ask why he went quiet for ten seconds every few minutes, just kept talking about the mugs she was firing that night, the way the wood kiln made the glaze crackle just right if you kept the temperature steady for 12 hours.
When she asked if he wanted to come back to her place to see the kiln, said she had cold horchata and leftover chiles rellenos stashed in her fridge, he froze for a full three seconds. The first words that came to his mouth were no, I have to get home to the goats, the excuse he’d used to turn down every invitation for four years. But then she reached out and brushed a stray cactus spine off his wrist, her fingers lingering just long enough for him to feel the callus on her index finger from centering clay on the wheel, and he said yes before he could overthink it.
The mariachi tracks blaring from the cantina’s outdoor speakers softened to a low hum as they walked the three miles to her adobe as the sun dipped below the mountains, painting the sky pink and deep tangerine, the sound of crickets starting to hum in the desert brush. When she pushed open her front door, the smell of warm clay and burning mesquite wrapped around him, and she handed him a hand-thrown mug full of iced horchata still frothy from the blender. He ran his thumb over the raised, hand-thrown ridge on the mug’s side, and let the warmth of the ceramic seep all the way up to his shoulder.
