Moe Yazzie, 59, has restored 72 vintage travel trailers in the eight years since his wife Elaina died of ovarian cancer. He runs his shop out of a converted hay barn 12 miles outside Flagstaff, lives with a floppy-eared hound named Grease, and avoids small town community events like he’d avoid a rusted-out Airstream with a frame so rotted it’d crumble if you looked at it wrong. His only reason for showing up to the annual county chili cookoff was that his green hatch chile pork recipe had been nominated for the grand prize, and the $500 payout would cover the new water heater he needed for the 1962 Shasta he was fixing up for a client in Phoenix. He’d planned to drop off his crockpot, grab a root beer, and bolt before any of the town regulars could corner him to offer the same tired condolences they’d been repeating since Elaina’s funeral.
He’s leaned against a splintered pine picnic table halfway across the fairgrounds when she approaches, and he doesn’t recognize her. The air smells like wood smoke, cumin, and overheated kettle corn, the mariachi band by the stage is plucking out a fast, brassy tune, and crushed red solo cups crunch under the scuffed leather of his work boots when he shifts his weight to make room for her at the sample table. She’s wearing faded high-waisted jeans, a canvas work shirt rolled up to her elbows, and her dark hair is pulled back in a braid streaked with a single silver strand right above her left temple. She leans in closer than most people do, close enough that he can smell eucalyptus and citrus on her, not the powdery floral perfume the other married women in town wear to these events, and asks if his chili has any beans in it. Her arm brushes his when she reaches for a sample cup, her nails painted the same deep terracotta as the desert clay he digs up to patch the potholes in his driveway, and he fumbles the metal ladle so bad a drop of chili splatters on the cuff of his navy flannel.
She laughs, warm and not mocking, and dabs at the stain with a napkin she pulls from her back pocket before he can protest. She says her name is Lena, she’s the new public health nurse the county brought in three months prior, and she’s already spilled three cups of lemonade and knocked over a jar of pickles at the contest table that afternoon, so she’s in no place to judge clumsiness. He finds himself talking to her for 20 minutes straight, first about chili, then about the trailers he restores, then about the time Elaina convinced him to drive a beat-up 1959 Scotty all the way to Cabo San Lucas for their 15th anniversary. He doesn’t even realize he’s mentioned Elaina until he pauses, waiting for the familiar pitying wince he gets from everyone in town when he says her name, but Lena just nods, says she lost her partner in a hiking accident five years prior, and that the worst part of being the new person in town is no one looks at her like she’s still allowed to laugh too loud or flirt with a stranger at a cookoff.
The tension coiled in his chest tightens then, half disgust half sharp, warm desire. He’s spent eight years clinging to grief like a security blanket, convinced that even thinking about being with anyone else would be a betrayal of the 22 years he had with Elaina, and half the town would probably whisper about him for months if they saw him so much as hold another woman’s hand. The mariachi band slows to a soft, swaying cumbia, and Lena tilts her head toward the patch of packed dirt by the stage that passes for a dance floor. She says she’s been dying to dance all day, but no one’s had the guts to ask her, probably because everyone in town already thinks the new nurse is too sharp to waste time on small talk and slow dances. He says he hasn’t danced since Elaina’s 40th birthday, 12 years prior, and he’s probably going to step on her toes so bad she’ll need a tetanus shot from her own office. She steps closer, her shoulder pressing firm against his, and says she’ll lead. No one’s keeping score.
He takes her hand, her palm rough with calluses from the community garden she runs on the weekends, and lets her pull him to the dance floor. He steps on her toe twice in the first minute, just like he said he would, and she laughs so hard she snorts a little, leaning into his chest to steady herself. He can feel the low rumble of her laugh through his flannel, can see the golden hour sun catching the silver streak in her braid, and he doesn’t even notice the handful of town regulars glancing over, their usual pitying looks replaced by quiet surprise. For the first time in eight years, he’s not thinking about the empty side of his bed, or the stack of Elaina’s old cookbooks he still keeps on his kitchen counter, or the quiet rule he’d made for himself the day she died that he’d never let anyone get close enough to hurt that bad again. He’s just thinking about how warm her hand is in his, how good she smells, how he hasn’t felt this light since the day they drove that Scotty across the border into Mexico.
The song ends a minute later, and she doesn’t pull away right away. She looks up at him, the corner of her mouth tugged up in a half smirk, and says she’s been looking for a small trailer to fix up for weekend trips up to the North Rim, and she’d love to see the half-restored 1968 Airstream he mentioned that’s parked behind his barn. He nods, says he’s free next Saturday, and grabs the foil-covered container of leftover chili he’d stashed under the picnic table earlier to bring home for himself, handing it to her. He says it’s better reheated the next day, that the flavors settle overnight, and she tucks a scrap of notebook paper with her phone number scrawled on it into the breast pocket of his flannel, her fingers brushing the scar on his chest from a trailer frame accident when he was 32 for half a second too long. She waves, says she’ll see him at 2, and walks off toward the lemonade stand, braid swinging behind her. He stands there for a minute, sipping his warm root beer, watching her joke with the taco vendor by the stage, and doesn’t even jump when his nosy next door neighbor slaps him on the back hard enough to make him spill root beer down his shirt.
