Rafe Jimenez, 53, had been restoring vintage Japanese motorcycles out of his cinder block shop on the edge of town for 12 years, and he’d perfected the art of vanishing when social obligations reared their head. He’d faked a sinus infection to skip his niece’s high school graduation, lied about a last-minute engine overhaul to get out of his best friend’s 50th birthday party, and he’d fully planned to duck out of the VFW chili cookoff 10 minutes after he showed up, just long enough for his foreman to stop nagging him about “getting out and living a little.” The air smelled like charred beef, cheap beer, and pine blown down from the surrounding hills, and he was already reaching for his keys when he saw her.
Mia Carter, Lila’s cousin, was 10 years younger than his late wife, and Rafe had avoided every family function she’d attended since she moved back to town six months prior to open the used bookstore on Main Street. He’d known her since she was 16, when she’d showed up at their wedding in a neon pink dress and a nose ring, and the way his chest tightened every time he saw her now felt like a betrayal, like he was cheating on a promise he’d made kneeling next to Lila’s hospital bed. She was carrying a chipped ceramic bowl of chili in one hand, her flannel shirt rolled up to her elbows, freckles dusted across her nose from working the bookstore’s outdoor stall at the farmers’ market all summer. She spotted him before he could slip around the cooler, and waved, her smile wide enough to show the tiny gap between her two front teeth he’d always found stupidly charming.
He froze, half turned toward the parking lot, and forced a smile back. She weaved through the crowd of families and retired VFW members, and tripped over the leg of a folding chair 2 feet from where he stood, lurching forward and grabbing his bicep to steady herself. His skin burned where her palm pressed against the worn denim of his work shirt, and he caught a whiff of lavender hand lotion mixed with the cinnamon she’d put in her chili, sharp and warm under the campfire smoke hanging over the field. “Sorry,” she said, laughing, brushing a strand of chestnut hair out of her face, “these boots have zero traction on wet grass. I swear I’m not usually that clumsy.”
He mumbled something about the chair being a hazard, and grabbed a beer from the cooler behind him to give his hands something to do. He kept expecting her to make small talk about the shop, or Lila, or the weather, but instead she leaned against the cooler next to him, close enough that their shoulders brushed when she shifted her weight, and told him about the guy who’d tried to trade her a first edition of *Slaughterhouse-Five* for a live chicken earlier that week. He found himself laughing, actually laughing, for the first time in months, not the tight polite chuckle he reserved for customers, and he didn’t even notice when 40 minutes slipped past, when the sun dipped below the tree line and the string lights strung between the VFW posts flickered on.
She pointed out the smudge of chili powder on his jaw after he sampled a spoonful of her entry, and reached up to wipe it off with her thumb before she thought better of it. Her skin was soft, calloused a little at the tips from turning book pages all day, and he held his breath while she did it, his eyes locked on hers. He could see the heat rise in her cheeks, and she pulled her hand back fast, staring at the grass at her feet for a second before she looked up again, her voice quieter now. “I’ve stopped by your shop three times in the last two months,” she said, picking at a loose thread on her flannel sleeve, “the guys up front always said you were in the back working. I figured you were avoiding me.”
He didn’t lie. He nodded, staring at the label on his beer bottle, and told her he felt like an asshole, like liking her was a slap in the face to Lila, like he was breaking some rule he’d written for himself the day she died. Mia didn’t say anything for a minute, then nudged his boot with hers. “Lila was my best friend for 30 years,” she said, soft, “she’d yell at both of us for being this stupid. She told me once, before she got sick, that if anything ever happened to her, she wanted you to stop moping and find someone who makes you laugh as hard as she did.”
The words hit him like a punch to the chest, and he realized the guilt he’d been carrying around for 7 years wasn’t a promise to Lila, it was just a way to hide from feeling anything at all, from the risk of getting hurt again. He looked up, and she was watching him, her dark eyes glinting in the string light, and he didn’t overthink it when she asked if he wanted to walk down to the river with her to get away from the noise of the cookoff. He left his half-empty beer on the cooler, his keys in his jacket pocket, and followed her across the grass, the crunch of fallen maple leaves under their work boots the only sound besides the distant roar of the crowd.
They stopped at the edge of the bank, the water dark and fast moving under the full moon, and she turned to face him, her shoulder pressed against his chest. He lifted his hand, brushed the strand of hair that had fallen in her face behind her ear, and kissed her slow, the taste of beer and chili and the spearmint gum she chewed mixing on his tongue. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him closer, and he didn’t feel guilty, didn’t feel like he was doing something wrong, just warm, alive, like he’d been holding his breath for 7 years and finally exhaled. Somewhere down the river, a blue heron called out, and he didn’t even think about the half-empty beer he’d left back by the VFW cooler.
