Manny Ortiz, 62, retired air traffic controller who spent 38 years talking down panicking pilots through thunderstorms and system outages, had never lost his cool once on the job. Off the job, though, he was a stubborn old cuss who held grudges longer than he kept his work boots. His wife of 37 years had ribbed him for it up until the day she died four years prior, saying his 40-year grudge against the high school quarterback who stole his engineering scholarship was heavier than the flight yokes he’d handled his whole career. He’d just grunted and changed the subject every time.
He only showed up to the block’s annual summer BBQ because his 11-year-old granddaughter, in town for the week, had batted her big brown eyes and said all the other kids were going to be on the slip and slide. He stood off to the side by the dented steel cooler, sweating through the collar of his faded Ohio State hoodie even though the temperature hovered at 82, sipping a blueberry craft beer some neighbor had pressed into his hand that tasted like fermented candy. He’d planned to slip out after an hour, go back to his garage and work on the 1972 Camaro he’d been restoring slow since he retired.
Then she reached for the cooler handle at the same time he did, reaching for another beer to avoid talking to the guy from down the street who kept ranting about property taxes. Her fingers brushed his, calloused at the tips, a scuffed silver leather tooling bracelet catching the sun on her wrist. He pulled his hand back like he’d touched a hot grill, and she laughed, a rough, warm sound like she smoked a single cigarette every night after dinner. “Sorry,” she said, grabbing a lime seltzer from the half-melted ice, “didn’t see you there.”
The neighbor manning the cooler waved between them. “Manny, this is Lou, just moved in next door last month. Lou, Manny’s the guy who can fix anything with a motor, if you ask nice enough.” When she said her last name, Manny’s jaw tightened. Ramirez. That was the quarterback’s last name. The guy who’d stolen his scholarship, who’d married the cheerleader Manny had dated for two years senior year, who’d sent him a Christmas card every year until 2019 with a photo of his golf tournament wins just to rub it in.
He should have walked away right then. Should have mumbled a nice to meet you and gone back to his side of the yard, written her off as just another Ramirez to avoid. But she smelled like coconut sunscreen and tanned leather, and she was staring at the thick silver ring on his left hand, the one the FAA had given him when he retired, engraved with his call sign. “My dad was an air traffic controller,” she said, leaning against the cooler, her shoulder a few inches from his, close enough he could feel the heat coming off her sun-warmed skin. “Hated every minute of it until he retired, then talked about it nonstop until he died.”
Manny snorted before he could stop himself. “That tracks. Most of us spend our whole careers waiting to quit, then miss the chaos the second we’re gone.” They talked for 20 minutes, standing there while kids screamed on the slip and slide and charcoal smoke curled through the thick, humid air. She told him she’d divorced Ramirez two years prior, moved up from Austin to get away from his constant need to show off, ran a vintage leather goods shop out of the spare bedroom in her new house. She made a joke about how her ex had once spent $3,200 on a custom golf club he’d used exactly once, then left it in the bottom of his closet because it didn’t match his bag, and Manny laughed so hard he snort-laughed, something he hadn’t done since his wife was alive.
He didn’t even realize they’d drifted over to the oak tree at the edge of the yard until she leaned in, her shoulder pressing solid against his, to point at his granddaughter doing a wobbly cartwheel on the lawn. Her hair, streaked with silver at the temples, brushed his jaw, and he could taste the lime from her seltzer on her breath when she turned to look at him, her dark eyes crinkling at the corners. “I’ve been watching you work on that Camaro in your driveway all week,” she said, her voice lower now, like she was sharing a secret. “Got a 1998 F-150 that needs an oil change bad, and I have no clue how to do it. You gonna teach me, or you gonna make me pay some snot-nosed kid at the auto shop 80 bucks to do it?”
Every stubborn, grudge-holding bone in his body told him to say no. Told him it was wrong to talk to his old rival’s ex wife, wrong to feel that warm buzz in his chest when she smiled at him, wrong to want to spend time with anyone that wasn’t the ghost of his wife. But then he thought about the grudge he’d carried for 44 years, heavy as a lead vest, and he thought about his wife’s voice in his head, calling him a dummy for holding onto all that anger when there was good stuff right in front of him.
“10 a.m. tomorrow,” he said, nodding at her pickup parked in the driveway next to his, visible over the low wooden fence. “Bring coffee. None of that weak store brand stuff.”
She grinned, tapping the front of his hoodie with one calloused finger, the scratch of her nail light through the thin fabric. “I got the good Cuban roast,” she said. “Saw the empty boxes in your recycling bin on Tuesday. Figured you had good taste.” She winked, then turned and walked back to the group of neighbors she’d been sitting with before, her linen shirt fluttering in the soft, warm breeze.
Manny stood there for a minute, holding his now-warm blueberry beer, watching her laugh at something someone said, and he took a sip of the terrible beer and didn’t even make a face.
