Rico Morales, 59, wipes grease from under his nails with the frayed edge of his Carhartt jacket as he locks the roll-up door to his vintage motorcycle restoration shop. It’s 6:30 on a crisp October Saturday, his lower back thrums from 12 hours hunched over a 1972 Honda CB750 he’s finishing for a Marine corporal deploying to Okinawa next month, and his only plan is to heat a frozen carnitas burrito, crack one cheap lager, and pass out halfway through a rerun of *The Good, the Bad and the Ugly* on his couch.
The annual neighborhood chili cookoff has spilled across the strip mall parking lot while he worked, folding tables strung with fairy lights, the air thick with cumin, smoked paprika, and the sharp, yeasty tang of craft beer. He tries to cut through a narrow gap between two tables to reach his beat-up Ford F-150, and a woman holding a crumpled paper bowl steps directly into his path. He recognizes her immediately: Lena, the woman who opened the used poetry bookstore two doors down three weeks prior, the one he’s gone out of his way to avoid, ducking behind a parts shelf when she waved at him through the front window last Tuesday. He’s never been good with new people, not since his wife Elara died of ovarian cancer eight years prior, not when every small chat felt like a betrayal of the life they’d built running the shop together.
She shoves the bowl into his hand before he can mumble an excuse to leave, their fingers brushing for half a second. Her skin is softer than he expects, smells like lavender hand cream and burnt chili powder, and he freezes, half ready to drop the bowl. “You’ve been glued to that bike since 7 this morning,” she says, nodding at the CB750 propped in his shop window, her voice low, rough around the edges like she’s been smoking for 30 years. “I know frozen burrito energy when I see it. Eat this. I made it. It’s got chocolate in it. Don’t make that face.”
He snorts, but takes a bite. It’s spicy, a little too much cumin, just sweet enough from the chocolate, and it hits him so hard he almost chokes: Elara used to make chili exactly like this, every Super Bowl Sunday, even when he complained that chocolate didn’t belong in something meant to burn the roof of your mouth. He looks up, and she’s leaning in, her shoulder brushing his flannel-covered bicep, her gray-streaked brown braid falling over one shoulder, a tiny silver hoop glinting in her left nostril. She’s wearing a faded 1998 Willie Nelson tour t-shirt and scuffed cowboy boots, and when she laughs at the way his eyes water from the heat, he feels something tight in his chest loosen, just a little.
He doesn’t mean to stay, but he does. She asks him about the CB750, and he rambles, tells her about the custom powder coat the Marine picked out, the way he rebuilt the carburetor three times to get it running just right, and she doesn’t just nod politely, asks follow-up questions, asks how long he’s been restoring bikes, asks if he ever rides cross-country anymore. He finds out she moved to Austin from Chicago four years prior, after her husband, a high school math teacher, dropped dead of a heart attack while coaching a rec league basketball game, that she opened the bookstore to be closer to her 7-year-old granddaughter, that she keeps a jar of dill pickles on her front counter for any kid who wanders in.
A group of drunk Texas State students stumble past, sloshing beer out of their plastic cups, and one slams hard into Rico’s shoulder. He stumbles forward, his hand landing automatically on Lena’s waist to steady both of them, and he doesn’t pull away right away. She looks up at him, her hazel eyes flecked with bright green, the fairy lights catching the silver strands in her hair, and she doesn’t step back. The noise of the cookoff fades for a beat, and he can hear her breath catch, can taste the cinnamon of her chili on the air, can feel the warmth of her waist under his calloused palm. “You gonna keep your hand there all night, Morales?” she teases, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a half-smile, and he laughs, loud, the kind of laugh he hasn’t let out since Elara died.
He doesn’t kiss her there, not with a dozen neighbors watching, not when they’re both still holding half-eaten bowls of chili. He tells her he’s got a six pack of hazy IPA in the cooler in his truck, asks if she wants to come back to the shop, see the CB750 up close, says he’s got a loaf of cornbread he picked up from the bakery down the street that morning sitting on his workbench. She nods, grabbing her frayed denim jacket off the back of a folding chair, and when they walk toward the shop, her fingers brush his once, then lace through his for three slow steps before she pulls away, like she’s testing the water too. The sun dips below the oak trees lining the parking lot, painting the asphalt pink and orange, and he doesn’t overthink it, doesn’t spiral into guilt about moving on, doesn’t worry about what comes next. He just squeezes her hand for half a second before he lets go, unlocks the shop door, and holds it open for her.
