Elroy Mendez is 62, makes his living restoring tattered vintage maps out of the cinder block garage behind his Grand Junction, Colorado, home, and has not willingly attended a county fair pop-up beer garden in seven years. He only caved this time because his only regular client, a retired park service historian, threatened to take his 1880s Ute territory survey map to a hack in Denver if Elroy didn’t come pick up the payment in person. The sun hung low and golden over the fairgrounds when he slid onto the end of a splintered picnic table, beer in one hand, folded check in the other, deliberately angling his body away from the clusters of neighbors he’d avoided since his wife Clara died eight years prior. He’d grown tired of the pitying stares, the unsolicited casseroles, the women from Clara’s church who kept sliding their single sister’s phone numbers into his tool bag when he dropped off restored church donation drive maps.
The gravel at his feet crunched before he heard her voice. She stumbled over a loose chunk of limestone, sloshing half a pint of amber ale down the sleeve of his faded gray flannel, and her free hand flew to his wrist to steady herself before she could apologize. “Shit, I am so sorry,” she said, and when he looked up, he recognized her immediately. Lila Marlow, Clara’s first cousin, 12 years younger than his late wife, last seen at their 20th wedding anniversary cookout in 2003, when she’d been fresh out of forestry school and headed off to work in Yellowstone. Her dark hair was streaked with silver now, pulled back in a braid tangled with pine needles, and her forest green nail polish was chipped halfway down every nail. She wore scuffed work boots and a park service uniform shirt with a bear claw tear in the left sleeve, and she didn’t flinch when he didn’t smile right away.
He grabbed a crumpled napkin from the table to blot at his sleeve, and their fingers brushed when she passed him a second, dry one. The contact was fleeting, but it sent a jolt up his arm he hadn’t felt since the first time he’d kissed Clara, back when they were 22 and working summer jobs at the same national park. He’d always felt a stupid, guilty flicker of attraction to Lila, back when she’d visited for holidays, but he’d shoved it down hard, disgusted with himself for even noticing his wife’s cousin, for being the kind of man who’d look anywhere else when he had a partner as good as Clara. Now she slid into the bench across from him, setting her remaining beer down, and didn’t mention Clara unless he brought her up first. They talked about her new post, running the backcountry trail system for the nearby Grand Mesa National Forest, about his map restoration work, about the way the pine beetles had chewed through half the old firs on the mesa since she’d left Colorado 20 years prior. She didn’t pity him. She didn’t ask if he was “doing okay” every five minutes. She teased him about still wearing the same beat up work boots he’d had back in 2003, the ones with the map of the Colorado River drawn on the side in permanent marker.
She showed up at 2pm the next day, carrying a paper bag of homemade peach pie from the farm stand down the road, and stepped into his garage workshop where the air smelled like rubber cement and old paper and lemon Pledge. Sun slanted through the cracked open garage door, catching dust motes dancing over the half-restored maps spread across his workbench. She leaned over his shoulder when he pulled the 1972 map out of a flat file cabinet, and her hair brushed his cheek, smelling like pine and lavender shampoo, and her arm pressed against his when she pointed to a tiny X he’d drawn in the corner of the map years before, marking the waterfall where he’d proposed to Clara. “I found that last week,” she said, soft, not pushing, and when he turned his head to look at her, their faces were three inches apart. He didn’t pull away. She didn’t either. The kiss was slow, soft, no hurry, like they both knew they’d been waiting 20 years for it.
They sat on his back porch after, eating cold peach pie and drinking iced tea, and he told her he’d felt guilty for even liking the sound of her laugh back when she was 22, like he was betraying Clara. She laughed and leaned her shoulder against his, said she’d had a stupid crush on him back then too, thought he was the only man she’d ever met who had the patience to tape a torn map back together one tiny scrap at a time, who never yelled when Clara burned the Thanksgiving turkey, who always left extra birdseed out for the scrub jays in the winter. “Clara would have teased us for being cowards this long,” she said, and he realized she was right. He’d spent eight years waiting to feel less guilty about being alive, about wanting to not be alone, and he’d never stopped to think Clara would want him to be happy.
She reached over and laced her calloused, paint-streaked fingers through his, scarred from years of cutting map paper with an X-Acto knife, and he didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away, didn’t feel guilty at all. A scrub jay landed on the porch rail, stole a crumb of pie crust off her empty plate, and flew off before either of them could move to shoo it away.
