Rafe Mendez, 52, makes his living sanding dents out of 1970s Airstream shells and rewiring vintage camper electrical systems, and he’s spent the eight years since his divorce telling anyone who asks that he doesn’t have time for anything that doesn’t involve aluminum sealant or a torque wrench. It’s easier that way. No arguments about who left the toothpaste cap off, no awkward small talk over breakfast with someone he doesn’t actually care to know, no risk of saying the wrong thing and watching another person walk out the door. He only agreed to come to the county fire department’s annual chili cook-off because his childhood friend, now a fire captain, guilt-tripped him into it, saying he hadn’t seen Rafe outside his cinder block shop in three months.
The tent smells like smoked paprika, charcoal, and cheap beer, the hum of 70s classic rock bleeding over the sound of families yelling over each other and kids chasing each other between folding tables. Rafe is leaned up against a wooden support pole, half-empty bowl of five-alarm chili in one hand, sweating through the collar of his well-worn Carhartt, when he spots her. Lila Marlow. His ex-wife’s first cousin. He’d only seen her a handful of times when he was married, usually at family holidays where she’d show up with dyed blue hair and a jar of homemade moonshine, and his ex would mutter under her breath that Lila was “too much of a wildcard to be trusted.” He’d always made a point not to look too long, back then. Figured it was easier to avoid the kind of trouble a woman like that carried with her.
He tries to duck behind a stack of paper plates when she looks his way, but it’s too late. She grins, tucking a strand of gray-streaked auburn hair behind her ear, and cuts through the crowd straight toward him. She’s wearing a white tank top dotted with grass stains, a faded flannel tied around her waist, scuffed work boots caked in mud, and when she stops in front of him she’s close enough that he can smell lavender and pine from the herbal body oil she wears, warm under the heat of the tent. “I knew that was you,” she yells over a verse of Free Bird, her shoulder brushing his when she leans in. “You still hold your beer like you’re scared someone’s gonna snatch it out of your hand.”
He huffs a laugh, shifting his weight awkwardly. He hasn’t talked to anyone in his ex’s family in six years, and the back of his neck prickles like half the people in the tent are staring. It feels wrong, talking to her. Like he’s breaking some unspoken rule he didn’t even know existed. But when she holds out a jar of pickled okra she brought as a side, offering him one, he takes it. Their fingers brush when he grabs the slim green pod, and he feels a jolt up his arm that he hasn’t felt since he was 19 and kissing a girl in the back of his first pickup truck. He tries to play it off, taking a bite of the okra and wincing at the tang of vinegar and dill, but she sees the way his jaw tenses, and she smirks.
They talk for 20 minutes, leaning up against that pole, and she tells him she moved back to the area three months prior, two years after her husband died in a logging accident, opened a small herbal apothecary in downtown Marshall. She bought a beat-up 1968 Scotty camper to haul her products to farmers markets around the state, she says, and she’s been looking for someone who knows how to fix old campers without charging her an arm and a leg. The whole time, he’s fighting the urge to lean in closer, to tuck that stray hair behind her ear himself, to stop worrying about what his ex would say or what the gossips at the local diner would whisper when they saw them together. He’s disgusted with himself for even thinking about it, at first. It’s messy. It’s taboo. It’s the exact kind of drama he’s spent years avoiding. But when she laughs at his terrible joke about the time he accidentally wired a camper’s lights to turn on every time someone flushed the toilet, her eyes crinkling at the corners, the resistance in his chest melts a little.
They wander outside the tent after a while, to get away from the noise, and lean against the bed of his dented 2004 Ford F150. The air is cool, crickets starting to chirp in the trees at the edge of the parking lot, and when she turns to face him, her knee brushes his denim-clad leg. “You know I always thought you were too good for her, right?” she says, quiet enough that no one else can hear, her eyes steady on his, no looking away. “You spent all those years working yourself to the bone to make her happy, and she never even bothered to ask what you wanted.”
Rafe freezes. No one has ever said that out loud to him. Not even his closest friends. He opens his mouth to say something, to make a joke to deflect, but she leans in first, her hand coming up to rest light on his forearm, and he can feel the calluses on her fingers from digging up root herbs for her apothecary. “I’ve had a crush on you since I was 22, Rafe,” she says, soft, like she’s sharing a secret. “I just waited until you stopped being too stubborn to notice.”
He doesn’t overthink it. He leans down and kisses her, tastes the pickled okra and honey from the sweet iced tea she’d been drinking, and her hand comes up to the back of his neck, her nails scratching light against the short hair there. The distant noise of the cook-off fades out for a second, and he can’t remember the last time he felt this light, this unburdened by all the rules he’d made up for himself.
When they pull apart, she laughs, wiping a smudge of chili from his chin with her thumb. She scribbles her phone number on the back of a crumpled chili cook-off entry slip, presses it into his palm, and tells him to come look at her Scotty camper Saturday morning. He nods, tucking the slip into the pocket of his Carhartt, and watches her walk to her beat-up Subaru, waving when she pulls out of the parking lot. He unfolds the slip a minute later, grinning when he sees she dotted the i in her name with a tiny hand-drawn mint leaf.
