Manny Ruiz is 57, spent 28 years as an FAA air traffic controller in Phoenix before a misread radar tag put a small cargo plane into a dirt runway short of the tarmac. No one died, but the guilt chewed him up bad enough he took early retirement, moved to a tiny adobe bungalow on the edge of Tucson, and started selling prickly pear and mesquite bean jam at the Saturday farmers’ market. His worst flaw? He won’t break a single rule, even the stupid ones. He waits for crosswalk signals on empty streets, never takes an extra sample from the salsa stand, hasn’t so much as looked at a woman romantically since his wife Elaina died four years prior.
The heat hits 92 by 10 a.m. that July Saturday, thick enough to taste the dust and creosote in every breath. He’s wiping jam off the edge of a mason jar when he glances two stalls down, catches Lena mid-wipe of sweat off her neck, her faded Selena tank top strap slipping down one sun-kissed shoulder. She’s Elaina’s first cousin, 10 years younger than him, just moved to town three weeks prior after a messy divorce, sells sourdough loaves and pan dulce from a dented folding table. He’s avoided her since she set up shop, even when she waved across the aisle that first Saturday. He’d felt a stupid, sharp jolt of attraction when he saw her at Elaina’s funeral, and the shame of it had curdled in his gut ever since. What kind of man pines for his dead wife’s cousin, for Christ’s sake?
A kid on a scooter skids around the tamale stand, slams into the leg of Lena’s table, sends a stack of wooden bread trays clattering toward the dirt. Manny moves before he thinks, steps around his own table, catches the top tray full of conchas before it hits the dust. When he holds it out to her, their hands brush. Her fingers are dusted with flour, warm, calloused at the tips from kneading dough, and the scent of cinnamon and coconut sunscreen rolls off her in a soft wave. She laughs, a little breathless, and her dark brown eyes crinkle at the corners the same way Elaina’s used to when she found something hilarious he’d said. “You always were faster than anyone I knew,” she says, and he freezes, because he didn’t think she remembered that far back, the family barbecues where he’d chase Elaina’s younger cousins around the backyard with water guns.
She asks him to get a drink at the dive bar down the street after the market closes, and he almost says no, almost makes up an excuse about feeding the stray cat that hangs around his porch. But then she tilts her head, and he remembers Elaina, the week before she went into the hospital for the last time, joking that if she ever kicked the bucket, she’d send Lena to haunt him until he stopped being such a stick in the mud. He agrees.
The bar smells like fried green chiles and old draft beer, the AC blowing so cold it raises goosebumps on his sun-warmed arms. They slide into a vinyl booth in the back, the sticky upholstery tugging at the seat of his jeans, and the jukebox spits out a Johnny Cash deep cut he hasn’t heard since he and Elaina were dating. Her knee brushes his under the table the second she sits down, and he doesn’t move away. She leans in across the table, elbows resting on the Formica top, and tells him she’s had a crush on him since she was 22, when he drove 3 hours to pick her up from a college party where her date had bailed and left her stranded. She never said anything, because he was happy with Elaina, and she wasn’t the kind of woman to break up a marriage.
He tells her about the jolt he felt at the funeral, how he’d hated himself for weeks after, how he thought it meant he was betraying Elaina. She reaches across the table, brushes her thumb over the thin scar on his left wrist, the one he got punching a metal locker the day after that cargo plane crash. “Elaina would have smacked you upside the head for being that stupid,” she says, soft, and he laughs, because it’s true.
The market crowd’s long gone by the time they walk out to her beat-up silver pickup, the sun painting the Santa Catalina mountains pink and orange at the edges, the residual heat from the asphalt seeping up through the soles of his work boots. She leans up against the truck door, tugs on the hem of his flannel shirt, and kisses him. He doesn’t overthink it, doesn’t run through a list of rules he’s breaking, doesn’t feel that familiar twist of guilt in his gut. He tastes cinnamon on her lips and realizes he doesn’t feel guilty, just light, like the weight he’s carried since that botched landing clearance finally lifted off his chest.
