Javi Ruiz, 54, makes his living stripping rust out of 1970s camper vans and patching fiberglass hulls in a drafty barn 10 miles outside of Black Mountain, North Carolina. He’s spent eight years perfecting a routine that involves zero mandatory small talk, zero setups from his overbearing older sister, and zero reasons to leave his property before 7 PM unless it’s to pick up a case of Pabst or a new angle grinder. The only exception is the annual town chili cookoff, a non-negotiable obligation his sister enforces by threatening to stop dropping off her homemade tamales every Sunday.
He’d shown up an hour prior, grabbed a paper bowl of the greasiest beef chili he could find, found a spot leaning against the bed of his beat-up Ford F-150, and had been plotting his escape for 45 minutes when his boot catches on the leg of a folding chair. He stumbles forward, grabs the edge of the nearest booth to keep from face-planting into a crockpot, and knocks a full bowl of bright orange chili all over the checkered tablecloth.
The woman behind the booth snorts instead of yelling. She’s leaning against a cinder block, one boot propped on the lower shelf of the folding table, a half-empty can of hard seltzer in one hand. Her dark hair is pulled back in a messy braid, a streak of silver cutting through the hair above her right temple, and her flannel sleeves are rolled up to show forearms freckled with sun and smudged with chili powder. “Easy there, cowboy. That was my last test bowl. You gonna pay me back or you just make a habit of ruining vegan chili for fun?”
Javi blinks. He’s got a whole speech prepared about how vegan chili isn’t real chili, about how if you don’t cook it with lard and three types of dried chile you might as well be serving soup, but it dies in his throat when he leans in to grab a handful of napkins and his hand brushes hers. Her skin is warm, calloused at the fingertips, and he can smell pine soap and cinnamon chewing gum on her when he’s close enough to wipe the spill off the edge of the table. “Vegan chili, huh? Figured that stuff tasted like cardboard.”
“Only if you make it wrong.” She pushes a new, smaller bowl across the table at him, her nail polish chipped a deep navy blue, her eyes crinkling at the corners when he meets her gaze. “Taste it. If you still think it’s cardboard, I’ll buy you a beer to make up for the near-death experience.”
He hesitates. He hasn’t voluntarily eaten anything that didn’t come out of a takeout container or a crockpot with more beef than vegetables in longer than he can remember, but he’s also not gonna turn down a bet. He takes a bite, and is caught off guard by the hit of smoked paprika, roasted sweet potato, and a sharp kick of jalapeño that lingers at the back of his throat. It’s good. Better than the beef chili he’d been eating 10 minutes prior. He doesn’t want to admit it, so he just grunts, sets the bowl down, and leans back against the table leg. “It’s passable.”
She laughs, loud enough that the group at the next booth glances over. The bluegrass band off by the park pavilion switches to a slower waltz, and a few couples start swaying on the patch of grass between the booths. She says her name is Lena, she’s the new part-time librarian at the town’s tiny main branch, she moved here from Portland six months prior after her mom got sick, and she’s been trying to find someone to fix the rust holes in the floor of her 1978 Westfalia for three weeks with no luck.
Javi’s brain short circuits for half a second. He’s got a waiting list three months long for van repairs, he turns down work every other week because he doesn’t want to deal with entitled tourists who want their vintage vans painted millennial pink and fitted with espresso machines, but he finds himself saying “I do that kind of work. Bring it by the shop Wednesday. No charge for the estimate, but you gotta bring a bowl of that chili with you.”
He’s already kicking himself for it before the words leave his mouth. He hasn’t invited anyone outside of his sister and his regular parts delivery guy to the shop in years, hasn’t even flirted with anyone since his ex-wife left him for a real estate agent in Charlotte eight years prior. The last time he tried to go on a date, he’d spent the whole meal talking about carburetor parts and left before dessert. He expects her to say no, to laugh it off, but she nods, pulls a crumpled receipt out of her jacket pocket, and scribbles her phone number on the back of it before sliding it across the table.
His sister rounds the corner of the booth then, a wide, knowing grin on her face, and Javi tenses up, ready to make an excuse about having to get back to the shop to finish a van for a client. Before he can, he finds himself asking Lena if she wants to walk down to the creek at the edge of the park once the cookoff wraps up, to check out the fall leaves before they all fall off the oak trees.
She says yes.
The sun is dipping below the tree line by the time they walk down the dirt path to the creek, the air sharp enough that Javi can see his breath when he exhales. He slips his worn canvas work flannel off and hands it to her when she shivers, and she pulls it on, the sleeves hanging past her wrists. They step over a gnarled root sticking out of the path, and she slips her hand into his, her fingers lacing through his easily, like they’ve done it a hundred times before. She rambles about the new poetry section she’s putting together at the library, about how the town’s retired English teachers keep bringing her first editions of Robert Frost that they find in their attics, and he listens, doesn’t interject with stories about van parts or his ex-wife or the way he’s terrified of letting anyone get close enough to see how messy his life really is behind the workshop walls.
A leaf the color of burnt orange twists down from the oak tree above them and lands in her hair, and he reaches up to brush it away before he can overthink the move.
