Hugo Rios is 62, a retired air traffic controller who lives in a one-room log cabin 20 minutes outside Flagstaff, Arizona. He’s spent the eight years since his wife Elara died of ovarian cancer intentionally keeping everyone but his immediate family at arm’s length, convinced letting anyone new in would be a betrayal of the 32 years they had together. Most days he restores vintage CB radios, hikes the trails behind his property, and cooks green hatch chili so spicy it makes his nose run. He only agreed to enter the town’s annual fall chili cookoff because his niece Lila begged him, swore his recipe was the only thing that could take down the local fire department’s overhyped ghost pepper entry. He’s leaning against a folding table next to his crockpot, wiping sweat off his brow with the cuff of his faded flannel, when she walks up.
She’s wearing scuffed Carhartt overalls, a threadbare Grand Canyon National Park tee, and cowboy boots caked in red dirt, a judge’s lanyard slung around her neck and a clipboard pressed to her chest. Silver hoop earrings catch the late afternoon sun as she leans in without preamble to sniff the chili, her shoulder brushing the bare skin of his forearm where he rolled his sleeves up. He catches a whiff of jasmine shampoo, pine resin, and peppermint gum on her breath when she says, “This smells like actual food, not the chemical weapon the firefighters brought.” He snorts, says he learned to make it from his abuela when he was stationed in Albuquerque in his 20s, never skips the extra oregano or the squeeze of lime at the end. She holds his gaze for three full beats, longer than casual politeness requires, grinning before she spoons a sample into a small paper cup.
He doesn’t place her until she mentions she was Lila’s college roommate, crashed at Hugo and Elara’s house for a weekend after graduation 12 years prior. His gut twists immediately. He hasn’t felt this fidgety, this aware of another person’s proximity, since Elara got sick. Half of him wants to pack up his crockpot right then, drive home, and hide out for the rest of the weekend, pretend this interaction never happened. He’s turned down half a dozen blind dates from former coworkers, ignored the widowed librarian who drops off chocolate chip cookies at his cabin every Christmas, all because the thought of being with anyone else makes his chest feel tight with guilt. But then she laughs at his story about burning a batch of chili last week because he got distracted troubleshooting a 1978 CB radio he found at a yard sale, and her laugh is rough, unpolished, not the polite, pitying chuckle people usually give old guys rambling about their hobbies. He catches himself staring at the corner of her mouth when she dabs a crumb of cornbread off it, and feels his face heat up like he’s 16 again, talking to a girl at a high school dance.
The awards ceremony wraps an hour later, and he takes third place, winning a $50 gift card to the local feed store and a cheap plastic trophy shaped like a chili pepper. The crowd thins as the sun dips below the pine trees, the air turning crisp enough that he can see his breath when he exhales. She finds him by his beat-up Ford F-150, loading the crockpot into the bed, and hands him a cold IPA she grabbed from the beer tent on her way over. They lean against the side of the truck, boots scuffing the gravel parking lot, while a mariachi band from the town square plays a slow cumbia off in the distance. She says she’s in town for a week, shooting mule deer for an outdoor magazine, was planning to drive up to the north rim of the Grand Canyon at dawn the next day. She’s got an extra spot in her campsite, she says, and could use an extra hand carrying her camera gear, and she’ll even bring homemade breakfast burritos if he comes along.
He freezes. A dozen stupid excuses bubble up immediately: he has to water Elara’s rose bushes, feed his neighbor’s cat, fix a busted antenna he’s been picking at for three weeks. Then he looks at her, notices the faint smudge of red chili powder on her left cheek, the scrapes on her knuckles from climbing a rock formation the day before, the way she’s twisting her left hoop earring like she’s just as nervous as he is. He remembers Elara telling him a month before she died that if he didn’t go out and live his life after she was gone, she’d come back to haunt him, hide all his favorite radio parts where he’d never find them. He huffs a quiet laugh, nods. He says he’ll bring the leftover chili, if she likes it hot enough to make your eyes water. She grins, reaches out to tap the plastic chili trophy sticking out of his truck bed, her fingers brushing his for half a second, warm and calloused from years of holding camera bodies. She says she’ll be at his cabin at 5 a.m., don’t be late. He watches her walk back to her own SUV, the string lights strung across the cookoff grounds gilding the edges of her dark hair, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel guilty for looking forward to tomorrow.
