Russell “Rusty” Mendez, 62, retired air traffic controller, had shown up to the Johnson County Volunteer Fire Department fish fry only because his next door neighbor badgered him for three weeks straight, said he was turning into a hermit who only talked to his border collie and the ham radio crew he chatted with on weekends. He’d spent 31 years staring at radar screens, making split-second calls that kept hundreds of people safe every shift, and that hyper-vigilance had stuck long after he turned in his badge. His biggest flaw, his late wife had always joked, was that he never let himself do anything that didn’t have a clear, pre-vetted outcome. Eight years after her stroke, that flaw had calcified into rigid routine: 6AM black coffee, 7AM walk with the dog, 2PM lunch of a bologna sandwich and dill pickles, 9PM lights out, no deviations.
The line for catfish moved slow, the July sun beating down hard enough to make the asphalt under his scuffed work boots soft enough to leave prints. He’d just fumbled his styrofoam cup of sweet tea, sloshing a quarter of it down the front of his faded Texas Rangers t-shirt, when a hand darted into his line of sight holding a crumpled paper napkin. He looked up, and for half a second he didn’t recognize her: sun-streaked brown hair pulled back in a loose braid, freckles across her nose, a cutoff denim shirt that showed the faint scar on her left forearm from the time she’d crashed the bike he’d fixed for her when she was 12. It was Lila, his old neighbor’s niece, the kid he’d watched grow up running through the front yards on their street every summer. She was 38 now, in town for six weeks to help her mom recover from a total knee replacement, she told him, when he fumbled a greeting.
He should have said a quick hello and gone back to staring at the back of the guy in front of him’s cowboy hat. That’s what the version of him that stuck to routine would have done. Instead, when she said she didn’t know anyone else at the fry and asked if she could sit with him, he nodded before he could think better of it. The picnic table was wobbly, the slats sticky with spilled soda and barbecue sauce, and when they sat down across from each other, her bare knee pressed against his under the table, warm through the thin fabric of his work jeans. She didn’t move it. He could smell coconut sunscreen on her, mixed with the grease from the catfish and the faint, sweet smell of the pecan pie she’d grabbed for dessert. The bluegrass band playing off to the side cranked up a cover of a Johnny Cash song he’d danced to with his wife at their wedding, and he tensed up, half convinced someone he knew would see them and start talking.
She teased him for it, that familiar little smirk on her face that he remembered from when she’d talk him into sneaking her extra candy bars before her mom came home from work. “You look like you’re waiting for a plane to crash,” she said, and he laughed, surprised she remembered what his old job had been. They talked for an hour, first about her mom’s knee, then about her job as a travel photographer, the shots she’d taken of glaciers in Alaska and street markets in Morocco, then about his ham radio setup, the way he talked to guys in Australia and Japan late some nights when he couldn’t sleep. Every time she leaned in to ask a question, her elbow brushed his, and he found himself leaning in too, forgetting to check his watch every five minutes like he usually did when he talked to people. The part of him that screamed this was wrong, that he was old enough to be her father, that the whole street would gossip if they saw them together, got quieter and quieter the longer she talked.
By the time the sun started to dip below the oak trees lining the park, most of the crowd had cleared out. He offered to walk her home, even though her mom’s house was only three blocks from his, and she said yes. They walked slow, her shoulder brushing his every few steps, the crickets starting to chirp in the grass along the sidewalk. When they got to her mom’s porch, she didn’t go inside right away. She leaned against the porch rail, looking up at him, and he could see the gold flecks in her brown eyes in the glow of the porch light. She told him she’d been wanting to talk to him since she got into town, that she’d always had a crush on the quiet guy next door who fixed her bike and brought her family peaches from his tree every summer. Before he could say anything, she leaned in and kissed him, soft, her hand brushing the side of his face. He didn’t pull away.
When she pulled back, she laughed at the stunned look on his face, and scribbled her cell number on the back of a grocery store receipt she pulled out of her pocket, told him there was a new dive bar downtown with a great jukebox that played all the old country he liked, if he wanted to go with her the next night. He nodded, tucking the receipt into the pocket of his jeans, and told her he’d pick her up at 7. He walked back to his house slow, the dog waiting for him on the porch, the faint taste of her cherry lip balm still on his lips. He ran his thumb over the scrap of paper with her number scrawled on it, already looking forward to skipping his usual 9PM bedtime for the first time in almost a decade.
