Javi Mendez, 59, has restored 17 vintage travel trailers in the four years since his wife Linda passed, and he’s got the scar across his left palm from a rusted screwdriver to prove every last one of them. He’s stubborn to a fault, still sleeps on the same lumpy cotton mattress he and Linda bought in 1992, still refuses to let his niece set him up on blind dates, still bites back a sharp retort every time Linda’s oldest friend Karen corners him at the grocery store to remind him “dating local would be a slap to everyone who loved her.”
The September Texas heat hangs thick over the small town chili cookoff, thick enough that the hickory smoke from the barbecue pits curls low to the dirt ground, thick enough that Javi’s tee is soaked through at the collar by 2 p.m. He’s wiping chili grease off his jeans when a shadow falls over his booth, and he looks up to find Clara Bennett, the woman who moved into the old Henderson farm three miles down the road three months prior, leaning against the splintered wood edge. She’s wearing a faded 1980s Willie Nelson tour tee, cutoff denim shorts that show off a constellation of freckles across her thighs, scuffed cowboy boots with silver toe caps that catch the sun. A strand of auburn hair streaked with silver falls in her face, and she blows it away with a soft huff, holding up a half-empty mason jar of sweet tea.
“Word on the fairground is your chili’s the only one here that doesn’t taste like someone dumped a whole bottle of tabasco in a can of beans,” she says, and her voice is low, rough around the edges from years of smoking, like old leather. He reaches for a sample cup, and their elbows brush when she leans in closer, the callus on her forearm from stacking hundreds of books for her mobile pop-up shop scraping light against his skin. He fumbles the ladle, a drop of chili splattering on his boot, and she smirks, the corner of her mouth tugging up just enough to show a tiny silver hoop in her lower lip he’d never noticed from across the fence line.
He hands her the cup, his fingers brushing hers for half a second, and he feels that jolt he hasn’t felt since Linda was alive, that warm spark in the pit of his stomach he’d convinced himself was gone for good. She takes a sip, hums soft, not the over-the-top fake moan you see in bad rom-coms, just a quiet, satisfied sound, and she nods, wiping a smudge of chili off her chin with the back of her hand. “Told you you weren’t wasting your time standing out here in the heat,” he says, and he’s surprised at how easy the tease comes, how he doesn’t immediately feel guilty for talking to a woman who isn’t Linda, for noticing the way her eyes crinkle at the corners when she laughs.
The conflict hits him a second later, when he glances over her shoulder and sees Karen standing by the bake sale booth, arms crossed, staring daggers at him. He feels his chest tighten, remembers the fight he and Karen had two weeks prior, when she’d found out he’d waved at Clara from his driveway, called him selfish, said he was throwing away 30 years of marriage for a “stranger who doesn’t know the first thing about you or Linda.” He’d told her to mind her own business then, but he’d avoided Clara for a full week after, too chicken to risk the drama, too convinced his guilt would win out over whatever stupid, quiet curiosity he’d been feeling about her.
Clara follows his line of sight, snorts, and leans in closer, so close he can smell the vanilla lotion she’s wearing mixed with the sweet tea on her breath. “Let her stare,” she says, quiet enough only he can hear. “I don’t care what the town gossips say, and neither should you. I asked around, you know. Linda sounded like the kind of woman who’d kick her friend’s ass for making you miserable.”
He blinks, shocked, because no one’s said that to him before. Everyone in town has tiptoed around his grief for four years, acted like he’s supposed to be a widower forever, like dating again would erase every good memory he has of Linda. He looks back at Clara, holds her eye contact for three full beats, and for the first time in four years, the guilt doesn’t feel like it’s going to swallow him whole.
“Got a cooler of cold Shiner Bock back at my shop,” he says, before he can talk himself out of it. “And a 1972 Airstream I’m restoring that has a working couch. I also got a line on the best fried oreos in the county, if you want to skip the rest of the cookoff.”
She grins, and her knee brushes his under the booth, warm and solid through the thin denim of his jeans. “I’ve been curious about that Airstream since I saw it parked in your driveway the day I moved in,” she says, and she slides a small, crumpled flyer for her book shop across the booth to him, her phone number scrawled on the back in blue ink.
He packs up his booth an hour later, Clara helping him haul the heavy cast iron chili pot to the bed of his beat up Ford F150, their hands brushing when they lift it over the tailgate. He doesn’t even glance in Karen’s direction when they pull out of the fairground parking lot, doesn’t feel a single twinge of guilt when Clara turns the radio up to an old George Strait track and sings along off key.
They pull into his driveway as the sun starts to dip low over the oak trees, painting the sky pink and orange. He grabs the paper bag of fried oreos from the passenger seat, and when he opens the shop door for her, she steps inside, her shoulder pressing warm and solid against his chest for half a second before she walks past him to get a closer look at the Airstream.
