Hugo Mendez, 53, makes his living restoring vintage neon signs for the dive bars and taco shops lining east Austin’s side streets, and he hasn’t so much as flirted with anyone since his wife Val died of ovarian cancer four years prior. It’s a self-imposed rule, one he’s clung to even when his buddies drag him out to honky tonks and waitresses slip their phone numbers under his beer coasters. He wears his wedding band so often the metal has worn a faint pale groove into his ring finger, and he still leaves Val’s favorite peonies on her grave every Sunday, no exceptions.
The October block party on his street is the last place he expects to feel that familiar, long-dormant tug of want. He’s leaning against the bed of his beat-up 2007 Silverado, a half-drunk Modelo in one hand, a smudge of neon phosphor glowing faint blue on the knee of his work jeans, when she sits down on the tailgate next to him. She’s Lila, his next-door neighbor’s niece, the one who helped her aunt move in six months back, the one he’s gone out of his way to avoid ever since he caught himself staring at the way her tool belt slung low on her hips when she carried a bookshelf up the front steps. She’s 38, a carpenter who builds custom tiny homes for a living, and she’s the last person he has any business being attracted to.
Their knees brush when she shifts to set her plate of elote down beside her, and Hugo freezes, half expecting a jolt of guilt to hit him. It doesn’t. All he feels is the heat of her bare leg through the rip in his jeans, the sharp, bright smell of lime and chili powder off her plate, the coconut sunscreen lingering on her skin even as the sun dips low below the oak trees lining the street. She asks him about the rotating sombrero neon sign he’s been building for the new taco stand three blocks over, the one he’s been putting 12 hour days on for the past two weeks, and he rambles a little about the finicky old transformers he sourced from a closed down 1970s bowling alley outside San Antonio. She leans in when he talks, her shoulder pressing firm to his bicep, and he can hear the lilt of her laugh over the mariachi band playing at the end of the block, over the kids screaming as they chase each other with glow sticks.
When he makes a dumb joke about neon wiring being more high maintenance than Val’s prize rose bushes ever were, she snorts, and her hand lands on his forearm, holding there for two full seconds before she pulls it away. The heat of her touch lingers through the thin flannel of his shirt, and Hugo’s chest tightens, half with excitement, half with the familiar, heavy guilt he’s carried for four years. He should move. He should make an excuse to go inside, lock himself in his shop, pretend this never happened. Instead he stays.
She admits she’s stopped by his shop three times in the past month, when his truck was gone, left a six pack of his favorite hazy IPA on his back porch each time. He’d wondered who was leaving those, had even joked to his buddy that he had a secret admirer, never once letting himself think it might be her. “I thought you were avoiding me,” she says, tilting her head so she can meet his eye, and she doesn’t look away when he flinches a little, like he’s been caught. He tells her he was, that he feels stupid for being attracted to someone so much younger, that he feels like he’s betraying Val even thinking about it.
She reaches over, brushes her thumb over the back of his hand where it’s resting on the tailgate, her calloused fingers (from sanding lumber, from swinging hammers) rough against his own calloused skin (from soldering wires, from bending glass tubing). “Who made the rule that you can’t be happy, Hugo?” she says, soft, no pressure, no teasing, just honest.
He stares at her for a long minute, at the tiny scar slashing through her left eyebrow from the bike crash she mentioned the one time they talked, at the flecks of lime salt on her lower lip, at the way she’s still holding his hand, gentle, like she’s not going to push him if he pulls away. He twists his wedding band around his finger three times, the way he always does when he’s nervous, then slips it off, tucks it into the inside pocket of his flannel, right next to the photo of Val he keeps there.
“Wanna come see the sombrero sign?” he says. “Got a cooler of that same IPA in the shop, too. Still cold.”
She grins, hops off the tailgate, holds out her hand for him to take. He laces his fingers through hers, and they walk past the brisket smokers, past the mariachi band, past the kids running around with face paint, the string lights strung between the oak trees gilding the ends of her loose wavy hair.
