Elio Ruiz is 62, retired U.S. Forest Service fire spotter, has lived in the same Hill Country single-wide for 28 years, and hasn’t voluntarily attended a community event since his wife Linda passed from lung cancer eight years prior. His biggest flaw is stubborn rigidity: he’s convinced any deviation from his routine of morning black coffee, half-day backcountry hike, and evening baseball on the crackling kitchen radio is a waste of energy that’ll only end in disappointment. His old crew buddy badgered him for three weeks straight to come to the weekly taco pop-up outside the town beer garden, and he finally caved just to get the guy to stop leaving rambling voice notes on his ancient flip phone.
The air smells like charred pineapple, mesquite, and cold October pine when he walks up, plastic plate of greasy al pastor in one hand, cheap lager in the other. A group of kids dart between the crowded picnic tables, one slams into his side, and he stumbles, knocking a frosty michelada clean off the edge of a nearby table. The beer and lime slosh all over both his worn work jeans and the jeans of the woman standing next to it, salt stinging the tiny scratch on the back of his left hand he got that morning chopping oak for winter fires.
He’s halfway through a mumbled, flustered apology when she laughs, loud and warm, no bite to it at all. He recognizes her immediately: Marnie Hale, ex-wife of his old fire crew supervisor, the hotheaded jerk who used to make the entire crew run 5 miles in 100-degree heat just because he was in a bad mood. She’s 58, he thinks, hair streaked with silver pulled back in a loose braid, freckles across her nose he never noticed back when they only crossed paths at awkward annual crew barbecues. She leans in, dabbing at the wet spot on his thigh with a crumpled paper napkin, her wrist brushing the denim so lightly he almost thinks he imagined it, and he can smell cedar shampoo and jasmine perfume over the taco grease and campfire smoke drifting through the lot.
He offers to buy her another drink, and she agrees, and they sit at a rickety picnic table on the edge of the lot, away from the yelling crowd and blaring mariachi speakers. He learns she left her ex three years ago, moved to town to be close to her granddaughter who’s in kindergarten at the local elementary. She teases him about the time he got stuck 40 feet up a pine tree during a 2017 wildfire, his radio dead, waiting four hours for a rescue crew to haul him down, and he’s shocked she remembers that, that she even paid attention to him back then. Their knees keep bumping under the table, neither of them moving away, and when she reaches across to grab a pickled onion off his plate, her fingers brush his, calloused from years of tending vegetable gardens, and his chest feels tight in a way he hasn’t felt since Linda was alive.
He spends the whole hour fighting the voice in his head that says he’s too old for this, that he’ll just mess it up, that it’s disrespectful to Linda’s memory to even think about going out with another woman. He knows it’s stupid, Linda always told him to live his life if something happened to her, but old habits stick hard. The taco truck closes up, the mariachi band wraps their last set, and a light drizzle starts to fall, dotting the chipped tabletop with tiny dark spots.
He walks her to her beat-up pickup truck parked at the edge of the lot, and she stops before she grabs the door handle, leaning in so close he can see the gold flecks in her hazel eyes, the faint scar above her left eyebrow from a hiking accident she’d mentioned ten minutes prior. She kisses him first, slow, tastes like lime and beer and cherry lip balm, and he doesn’t hesitate, one hand settling on the small of her back, the other still holding his half-empty beer, the rain getting a little heavier, soaking the cuffs of his frayed flannel shirt. He doesn’t care who sees, doesn’t care that half the town will be talking about it by tomorrow morning, that his old supervisor still runs a feed store 20 minutes out of town.
When she pulls back, she grins, pulls a ballpoint pen out of her jacket pocket, scribbles her phone number on the back of a crumpled taco truck receipt, and presses it into his palm, her fingers wrapping around his for a beat longer than necessary. She tells him she’s off next weekend, knows a hiking trail up in the national forest that leads to a hidden waterfall, if he’s interested. He nods, words stuck in his throat, and watches her pull out of the lot, waving through the fogged truck window.
He stands there for a minute, rain soaking his gray hair, the receipt crumpled in his fist, the smell of jasmine still clinging to the collar of his shirt. He pulls his flip phone out of his jeans pocket, flips it open, and starts punching in the digits before the stupid, anxious voice in his head can talk him out of it.
