Eli Rourke stood by his dented stainless steel crockpot at the county fire department’s annual chili cook-off, picking at a frayed cuff on his charcoal Carhartt flannel, boots caked with the dark clay mud he’d tracked in after fixing a split fence post on his property that morning. The air smelled like cumin, burnt hot dogs, and the faint acrid tang of diesel fumes drifting through the open bay doors from the fire trucks parked out front. He’d only shown up because his former railroad coworker had begged him to enter his famous venison chili, the recipe he and his wife had tweaked for 20 years, and he’d caved rather than listen to three weeks of nagging at their monthly poker game. At 61, three years removed from his retirement as a short-line railroad operations manager and three years out from his wife’s death from breast cancer, he’d stuck to a rigid, isolated routine: work on the 1952 EMD GP7 locomotive he’d bought at auction, eat frozen dinners on his couch, ignore all small talk from strangers. He’d planned to grab a beer, hang around long enough to not be rude, and bolt back to his pole barn before anyone could corner him into small talk.
That plan dissolved when the woman he’d been actively avoiding for four months stepped into his orbit. She was his new neighbor, 49-year-old Lila Marquez, the food writer who’d bought the old farmhouse half a mile down his gravel road after her divorce, the one the town gossips had been chattering about since she’d moved in, calling her “too forward” for stopping to chat with every stranger at the hardware store, for wearing cutoffs to carry lumber in her yard in July, for asking after the reclusive railroad guy who never waved back when she drove past. She wore a faded Levi’s jacket over a cream thermal, a red knit scarf tied loose around her neck, scuffed work boots on her feet, and held a crumpled paper bowl in one hand, already half full of some bright red chili she’d brought to enter. She stepped close enough that he caught the warm scent of cinnamon and clove off her contest entry, plus the faint sharp smell of the peppermint lip balm she wore, and leaned in to read the handwritten sign he’d taped to his crockpot: “Railyard Venison Chili, No Beans, No Apologies.”
“Took me long enough to track you down,” she said, grinning, and held eye contact longer than was strictly polite, no demure glance away, no awkward fidgeting. She reached past him to grab a plastic spoon from the stack on his table, and her elbow brushed his bicep through the flannel, warm and solid, and he flinched like he’d been shocked. He hadn’t been touched by anyone who wasn’t a cashier handing him change or his doctor checking his blood pressure in three years. He fumbled for a napkin, knocked over a stack of paper bowls, and she laughed, a low, throaty sound that didn’t feel like she was making fun of him. “Relax, I’m not here to steal your secret recipe. I just heard the railroad guy’s chili was the only one worth trying.”
He stammered out a thank you, watched her take a bite, saw her eyes go wide. “Holy shit,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “That beats my pork and green chile by a mile. I’m conceding now, before the judges even announce the winners.” He found himself laughing, a real laugh, not the forced half-grunt he gave to grocery store clerks, and told her about how he’d hunted the deer himself the prior fall, how his wife had come up with the trick of adding a splash of stout beer to the base to cut the gaminess. He didn’t usually mention his wife to strangers, but it didn’t feel like a weight saying it out loud to her. When the judges called his name for first place, she cheered so loud her cheeks went pink, pressed a cold can of root beer into his hand, and her fingers lingered on his wrist for a beat longer than necessary, calloused from working in her garden, warm through the thin cotton of his sleeve. The old guilt pricked at him then, sharp and familiar—what would his wife think, him standing here flirting with a woman half a mile from the house they’d built together? He almost made an excuse to leave right then, almost lied and said he had a leaky pipe to fix, but then she asked about the locomotive he was restoring, said she’d written a feature on Ohio short line railroads back in 2018, that she’d always loved old trains, that she’d seen the locomotive peeking out of his pole barn when she drove past and had been dying to see it up close.
He hesitated for a full ten seconds, warring with the voice in his head that screamed he was being disrespectful, that he should keep his life closed off, that he didn’t deserve to have fun again. But she wasn’t pushing, she was just standing there, smiling, waiting, no expectation on her face. “I’ve got a jar of homemade peach pie moonshine back at the barn,” he said, before he could talk himself out of it. “If you don’t mind dust and grease, you can come take a look.” She said yes immediately, no hesitation, no games. They took his beat up 1998 F150 down the gravel road, she rolled the passenger window down, and the smell of cut hay and pine drifted into the cab, and her knee brushed his on the bench seat once, twice, when he hit a pothole, and he didn’t move away. When he flipped the lights on in the pole barn, the locomotive glowed under the string lights he’d hung last winter, the fresh navy blue paint he’d spent three weekends applying shining bright. She stepped past him, ran her hand along the cold steel side of the engine, and turned back to him, her eyes soft in the warm light. “It’s incredible,” she said, and she was close enough he could feel the heat off her shoulder, could see the faint smattering of freckles across her nose he’d never noticed when he’d driven past her on the road.
He reached for the jar of moonshine he kept on the workbench by the engine, poured two shots into mismatched mason jars he’d salvaged from his wife’s canning shelf, and handed her one. Their fingers brushed as she took it, and this time he didn’t flinch, didn’t jerk his hand away, held the contact for a beat. He nodded at the row of folding chairs he’d set up next to the engine, the spot where he sat every evening after dinner to drink a beer and plan the next day’s work. “I can walk you through all the work I’ve done so far, if you’ve got a couple hours,” he said. She sat down, crossed her legs, took a slow sip of the moonshine, and grinned up at him, no trace of hesitation on her face.
