Moe Castellanos, 62, had only dragged himself to the Willow Creek annual chili cookoff because his next door neighbor had broken her ankle three days prior and begged him to drop off her prize-winning hatch green chili entry. He’d planned to ditch the second he handed the crockpot off to the volunteer at the check-in table, his boots already scuffing toward the gravel parking lot when he heard a laugh he’d thought he’d forgotten.
It was lower than he remembered, rougher around the edges, and when he turned he spotted Elara Voss leaning against a sticky folding table, holding a paper bowl of chili and talking to the local pastor, her silver-streaked auburn hair pulled back in a loose braid. She was Diane’s cousin’s ex-wife, the woman he’d spent every family reunion in the 2000s sneaking ten minute conversations with by the beer cooler, talking about old slot machine parts and the pulp Westerns she checked out from the library back in Portland. He’d not seen her since the divorce was finalized three years prior, had told himself over and over that even thinking about her was a betrayal of the 32 years he’d had with Diane.
“You still own that beat-up 1957 Bally slot machine you were restoring the last time I was out here?” she asked, no preamble, and Moe huffed a laugh, shifting the crumpled paper napkin he was holding in his hand. Their fingers brushed when she reached out to take the napkin from him, to wipe a smudge of chili grease off his jaw that he hadn’t noticed, and he felt the callus on her index finger, the one she got from turning thousands of book pages a month working as a head librarian. He froze for half a second, half the time wanting to lean into her touch, half the time wanting to step back, to run back to his workshop where no one could make him feel this off-kilter.
People were glancing, he noticed. A few of the old church ladies who’d known Diane for decades were staring from the next table, their eyebrows raised, and Moe felt a sharp twist of guilt in his gut. He’d spent eight years telling himself he’d never look at another woman, that his life was full enough restoring vintage slot machines for casino collectors and fishing on the McKenzie River on weekends, that he didn’t need anything else. But Elara was still looking at him, her hazel eyes flecked with gold, the corner of her mouth tilted up like she knew exactly what he was thinking.
“I still have it,” he said finally, his voice rougher than he intended. “Spent three years tracking down an original coin slot for it last year. Still doesn’t work quite right.”
She stepped a little closer, her shoulder brushing his when a kid ran past holding a dripping blue snow cone, and Moe didn’t step back. “I always wanted to see it,” she said, soft enough that only he could hear, over the noise of the band and the crowd yelling as the chili winners were announced. “I’m in town for a month helping my sister move into that new cottage by the lake. Got nothing to do most nights.”
The guilt was still there, sharp and hot at the back of his throat, but it was tangled up with something else, something he hadn’t felt in almost a decade: excitement, the quiet thrill of doing something he wasn’t supposed to, of letting himself want something instead of just existing. He thought of Diane, how she’d always teased him for being too stubborn for his own good, how she’d told him a month before she died that he better not spend the rest of his life alone once she was gone.
“C’mon then,” he said, nodding toward his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150 parked at the edge of the lot. “Workshop’s twenty minutes out of town. Got a cooler of root beer in the back, if you like the old glass bottle kind.”
She grinned, slinging her canvas tote bag over her shoulder, and walked with him to the truck, her hand brushing his every few steps when they walked over the uneven gravel. He opened the passenger door for her, waited until she was settled before he climbed into the driver’s seat, turning the key in the ignition. The radio flicked on mid-chorus of *Chattahoochee*, and Elara laughed, tapping her boot against the dash. Moe glanced over at her, the golden hour sun slanting through the window and catching the silver in her hair, and he put the truck in drive, pulling out of the parking lot toward the tree-lined highway leading home.
