Manny Ruiz is 62, spent 38 years climbing transmission poles for central Texas’s main power co, retired three years back with a gimpy left knee and a pension that covers his property taxes and all the brisket he can smoke on weekends. His biggest flaw, if you ask his only son, is that he’s hidden himself away from the world since his wife Elaina died eight years ago, turning down every dinner invitation, every set-up, every excuse to leave his creaky ranch house outside Seguin for anything that isn’t a hardware store run or a volunteer fire department meeting. He’d spent so long convincing himself any new joy was a betrayal of Elaina he’d forgotten what it felt like to look forward to something that didn’t involve a power drill or a rack of ribs.
He’s at the annual VFD chili cookoff mid-October, stuck on the judging panel because he’s the only guy in town who’s won the grand prize three years running, when she sits down next to him. The folding chairs are crammed so tight on the fairground blacktop her denim-clad thigh brushes his before she can adjust, and he jolts like he touched a live line. He looks over, and it’s Lila, Elaina’s younger cousin, the one who moved back to town last year to run the used bookstore on Main Street. He hasn’t seen her since Elaina’s funeral, when she’d hugged him so tight he thought his ribs would crack, then vanished before he could thank her for bringing the pecan pie Elaina always asked for at holidays.
The air smells like smoked paprika, burnt oak, and diesel from the old fire truck parked by the stage. A local country cover band is drawling through a deep cut George Strait track off to the side, kids screaming as they chase a scruffy border collie through the crowd. Lila flags down the kid passing around coolers, orders two Lone Stars, passes the first to him before grabbing one for herself, and their fingers brush when he takes the styrofoam cup. Her skin is softer than he expects, calloused only at the tips from turning thousands of book pages, and he fumbles the cup a little before he gets a grip.
He’s immediately ashamed of the hot jolt that runs up his arm. This is Elaina’s cousin, for Christ’s sake. He’d watched her graduate high school, helped her change a flat tire on her old Civic when she was 20 and stranded on the side of I-10 in a thunderstorm. He’s known her for 30 years. But when she turns to him, her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners the exact same way Elaina’s used to when she’s about to tease him, he can’t look away. She asks him why he didn’t answer the door when she dropped off a box of Elaina’s old recipe cards at his house last month, and he flushes, admits he thought it was a solar panel salesman, that he ignores almost everyone who knocks. She laughs, loud and warm, and the sound cuts through the noise of the crowd like a knife.
They talk for an hour, first making fun of the chili entry that tastes like someone dumped a whole bottle of cinnamon in it, then about the bookstore, then about Elaina. Lila tells him Elaina used to call her once a month, up until the month before she died, complaining that Manny was being too stubborn to retire, that he was going to fall off a pole and break his fool neck, that she wanted them to take that road trip to New Mexico they’d been planning for 20 years. She says Elaina told her, once, that if anything ever happened to her, Lila was the only person stubborn enough to drag Manny out of his self-imposed isolation. He feels the back of his throat burn, looks away so she doesn’t see him get teary.
The band slows down, starts playing “Amarillo by Morning” stripped back, no drums, just a guitar and a fiddle. Couples around them start standing up, swaying slow in the patchy grass between the tables. Lila sets her empty beer cup down on the ground next to her chair, looks up at him, her knee still pressed to his, and asks him if he wants to dance. He hesitates for a full five seconds, his brain screaming that this is wrong, that he’s betraying Elaina, that everyone in town will gossip for months. But then she leans forward a little, so he can smell her lavender perfume, lighter than the heavy stuff Elaina used to wear, and he nods.
He stands slow, his left knee creaking loud enough that she snorts a little, and holds his hand out to her. She takes it, her palm fitting perfectly in his, calloused fingertips brushing the thick, raised scar on the back of his hand he got from a line fall back in 2007. He rests his other hand on her waist, she puts her hand on his shoulder, and they sway, slow, not moving more than a few inches in either direction. She’s close enough that he can feel her breath on his neck when she tells him she’s liked him since she was 19, that she came to the cookoff specifically to see if he’d finally stop hiding.
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, just holds her a little tighter, the noise of the crowd fading out until all he can hear is the fiddle and her quiet breathing. When the song ends, he doesn’t let go of her waist. He asks her if she wants to get pancakes at the diner on Main Street tomorrow morning, the one that makes the blueberry stack Elaina used to rave about, and she smiles, nods, her thumb brushing the scar on his hand again.
A kid chasing the border collie runs between them, and they step apart, but he doesn’t let go of her hand.
