Roy Pacheco, 62, pulls his freshly restored 1972 VW Westfalia into the Palisade Peach Festival fairgrounds, sun beating down hard enough to make the asphalt shimmer at the edges of the lot. Smells of charred bratwurst, hop-heavy local IPA, and overripe freestone peaches drift over the chain link fence, and for half a second he considers driving right back out. He’d sworn he’d never come back here after his wife Elaina died four years prior—this was where he’d asked her to marry him in 1987, where they’d entered her peach pie in the contest every year for three decades—but his old wildland fire crew buddy had begged him to enter the bus in the restoration raffle to raise money for the VFW’s veteran food bank, and he couldn’t say no. He adjusts his frayed Carhartt hat, the one stitched with a 2002 Mesa Fire patch, and avoids the crowded beer tent entirely, heading for the quiet used book table tucked between the pie contest booth and the 4-H rabbit pens.
The table is staffed by Clara Mendez, 58, the part-time librarian who runs the town’s summer reading program for kids. He spots a dog-eared first paperback edition of *Lonesome Dove* tucked under a stack of children’s picture books, reaches for it at the exact same time she does. Their knuckles brush. Hers are cool, smudged with indigo library stamp ink, calloused at the fingertips from turning thousands of pages a week, and the jolt that shoots up his arm is so sharp he almost yanks his hand back like he touched a hot camp stove. He meets her eyes, hazel with flecks of gold that catch the sun, and she holds his gaze half a beat longer than polite, a tiny, teasing smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth like she knows exactly how out of place he feels.
The guilt hits him first, sharp and sour in the back of his throat. He hasn’t flirted with anyone in 40 years, hasn’t wanted to, and for half a second he’s disgusted with himself, like he’s doing something wrong, like Elaina is watching from somewhere and shaking her head. But Clara doesn’t push, doesn’t make a grand move, just hands him the book for free, her palm brushing his when she passes it over, and says she’s a sucker for anyone who still reads Larry McMurtry in the age of TikTok. She mentions she’s been wanting to drive up to the Grand Mesa’s north overlook to watch the sunset paint the aspen groves pink all summer, but her 2008 Subaru died in the library parking lot last month and she hasn’t had the cash to fix it.
The thought pops into his head unbidden, before he can talk himself out of it. He offers to take her up tomorrow, says the bus has a fold-out bench in the back, he can bring a cooler of peach seltzer and the peach pie he baked last night that’s been sitting on his kitchen counter going to waste. He tenses up after he says it, waiting for the rejection, waiting for her to say it’s too soon, that everyone in town will talk, that he should still be mourning. Instead, she grins, grabs a library checkout slip from the stack next to her, scrawls her phone number on the back in that same indigo ink, and tucks it into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, her fingers brushing the faint old burn scar on his chest he got from a 1998 brush fire.
He stays at the table for another hour, talking about old fire deployments, about the worst camper restoration jobs he’s ever taken (a 1990s Winnebago full of rat nests and old fast food wrappers takes the top spot), about the way Elaina used to make him read *Lonesome Dove* out loud to her on their annual camping trips. He doesn’t feel guilty when she laughs at his bad jokes, doesn’t feel weird when their knees brush under the table, doesn’t care when he sees two of Elaina’s former bridge club friends glance over and nudge each other. By the time the raffle starts, he’s already looking forward to tomorrow, already mapping the route up the Mesa in his head, already remembering where the best pull-off is for watching the sunset without any crowds.
