Manny Ruiz, 53, spent 22 years bulldozing swampland for central Florida highway expansions before a torn rotator cuff forced him into early retirement. Now he runs a 2-acre citrus stand off the I-4 exit for Deland, selling sun-warmed tangerines, orange blossom honey, and jars of his grandma’s lime marmalade six days a week. His biggest flaw? He’s spent the eight years since his wife left him shutting down any hint of romantic interest, convinced that any connection at his age is just a setup for another messy, expensive letdown. He only leaves his stand or his tiny clapboard house on the property for the weekly VFW fish fry and the annual Deland Citrus Festival, where he rents a booth right by the corn dog stand.
The festival was halfway through its second Saturday when she walked up. He was stacking mesh bags of navel oranges, the sun beating down hard enough to make the asphalt under his boots soft, when a linen sleeve brushed the glass honey jar sitting on the edge of his table. He looked up ready to snap, and froze. It was Lila Marlow, his ex-wife’s younger half-sister, the one he hadn’t seen since his ex skipped town with a cruise ship bartender 12 years prior. She was 48 now, the chestnut hair he remembered from her 20s streaked with a single silver strand at her temple, cut short enough to curl at the nape of her neck. She held a half-eaten tangerine sample in one hand, sticky juice glistening on her knuckles, and held his gaze for three full seconds before a small, lopsided smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
His first instinct was to shut down. The entire Marlow family had taken his ex’s side in the split, even though everyone knew she’d been cheating for six months before she left. He’d spent years actively avoiding any mention of them, deleting old photos, blocking every family member on social media. But he couldn’t make himself look away. She leaned in over the table, the coconut scent of her sunscreen mixing with the sweet tang of citrus in the air, and asked if he still had that peppermint lip balm he used to slather on every morning before heading out to the construction site. Her elbow brushed his bicep when she reached for a wet wipe he held out, and the heat of the contact lingered on his skin long after she’d pulled back.
He tried to keep his answers short, gruff, but she kept asking questions, teasing him about the beat-up work boot keychain hanging from his jeans loop—one he’d carved himself in the construction site break room when he was 32. She told him she’d left her abusive husband three years prior, moved to a small town outside Atlanta to work as an elementary school librarian, and was only in Deland for another week helping her mom recover from knee replacement surgery. He found himself telling her about the rotator cuff surgery, the citrus grove, how he spent his weekends fishing in the St. Johns River alone. He didn’t even notice the sky darkening until a fat raindrop splattered right on the top of his baseball cap.
The rain hit fast, hard, sending festival attendees scrambling for cover. He grabbed the blue tarp he kept rolled up under the table, and before he could tell her to run for shelter, she was grabbing the other end, helping him stretch it over the stacks of citrus crates. Their hands brushed a dozen times as they tied the tarp down to the table legs, gusts of wind blowing rain into their faces, her laugh cutting through the sound of the downpour when a gust ripped his baseball cap right off his head and sent it skittering across the asphalt. By the time they had the booth secured, both of them were soaked through, his flannel shirt sticking to his shoulders, her linen shirt clinging to her ribs.
The rain tapered off 20 minutes later, leaving the air thick with the smell of wet dirt and orange blossom, golden hour light spilling over the tops of the oak trees lining the festival grounds. He grabbed two cold domestics from the cooler under his table, and gestured to the tailgate of his beat-up 2008 Ford F150 parked behind the booth. She followed him, no hesitation, and when they sat down, she leaned her shoulder against his, warm even through their wet shirts. She admitted she’d had a crush on him when she was 20, used to make up excuses to bring her sister lunch at the construction site just to talk to him for five minutes. He admitted he’d always thought she was too kind, too soft, to get wrapped up in the chaos of his ex’s family drama. Her hand rested on his thigh for two quiet seconds, and he covered it with his own, his palm calloused from decades of gripping bulldozer controls, hers soft from turning library book pages.
The rest of the festival crowd filtered out as the sun dipped below the horizon, the distant sound of the country band on the main stage fading to a low hum. He asked her if she wanted to come back to his place for dinner, said he had fresh mahi mahi in the fridge he’d caught two days prior, and a jar of his key lime pie filling he’d made the night before. She nodded, her thumb brushing the back of his hand where he still held hers. He tucked a strand of rain-soaked hair behind her ear before holding the passenger side door of his truck open, his boots squelching in the leftover puddles on the gravel.
