Rafe Mendez, 53, has run a vintage motorcycle restoration shop outside Austin for 18 years, and he’s held a grudge against his ex-wife’s side of the family for 12 of them. He only showed up to the small-town chili cook-off because his 16-year-old niece begged him to judge the youth division, and he’s never been able to say no to that kid. He’s leaning against the tank of his fully restored 1972 Triumph Bonneville, sipping a Shiner Bock, ignoring the waves from distant cousins, when the sharp tang of cumin and wood smoke curling through the late October air gets caught by a gust of wind, and he turns away to cough.
His shoulder slams into a warm, solid frame, beer sloshing over the can’s rim to soak the front of a faded Willie Nelson cutoff tee. He’s already muttering a gruff apology, ready to brush past and hide back by his bike, when he hears her laugh—low, smoky, the same laugh he used to catch himself leaning in to hear at family weddings back when he was still married. It’s Lila, his ex-wife’s cousin, the only person on that side of the family he ever actually liked, before the 2011 parts deal that scammed him out of $14k and left him convinced every last one of them was a liar.
She’s got sun-streaked dark hair pulled back in a frayed denim scrunchie, a smudge of chili powder high on her left cheekbone, and she doesn’t step back. Most people would, when he’s glowering like that, grease crusted under his fingernails, scuffed steel-toe boots, the permanent furrow between his brows from 10-hour days hunched over engine blocks. She leans in instead, tilting her head like she’s studying him, and their elbows brush when she swipes a crumpled napkin from the front pocket of his oil-stained flannel. The contact is brief, but he feels the heat of her skin seep through the thin cotton, all the way down to his bones.
He’s halfway to snapping that he doesn’t want to talk to anyone from her side of the family, when she holds up a hand, stopping him. “I know what Jax did,” she says, and her voice is softer now, no trace of the laugh from a second ago. “I divorced him three months after that parts deal fell through, when I found out he scammed three other local guys too. I’ve been trying to find a way to apologize for 12 years. I didn’t say anything back then, I was scared of him, and that was garbage of me.”
The disgust he’s carried tight in his chest for so long warms into something else, something he hasn’t felt in years: a nervous flutter, like he’s 17 again, stuttering through asking a girl out to the drive-in. He’s spent 12 years actively avoiding every member of her family, but he’s also spent 12 years catching himself thinking about her: the way she used to slip him extra pecan pie at Thanksgiving when his ex wasn’t looking, the way she stayed to help him fix his truck when it broke down in the church parking lot after his sister’s baby shower, when everyone else bailed to go to the bar.
She admits she’s the one who’s been leaving cases of Shiner on his shop porch every month, the one who left a tin of homemade pork tamales at his front door last Christmas when he was sick with the flu. He’d assumed it was his 19-year-old apprentice, who owed him a favor for covering his shifts when his mom was in the hospital. “I didn’t want to bug you,” she says, and she looks away for the first time, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear, like she’s nervous. “Figured you’d slam the door in my face if I knocked. But I was hoping you’d eventually ask who it was.” She nods toward the dirt road leading out of the fairgrounds, her beat-up 1998 Ford F-150 parked half a mile down by the creek. “I got a crockpot of chili in the back. Won first place at the county fair last month. Got dark chocolate and stout in it. You wanna skip the rest of this mess, go try it?”
