Rudy Gallegos, 62, retired highway maintenance foreman, leans against the dented bed of his 1972 Ford F-100, wiping smudges off the chrome bumper with a frayed microfiber cloth. The weekly classic car meet at The Rusty Spur off Route 285 hums around him: the crackle of a brisket grill 10 feet away, Johnny Cash warbling through beat-up outdoor speakers, the high whine of a teen revving a restored Camaro down the dirt access road. He’s come every Wednesday for 18 months, never stays longer than an hour, never talks to anyone longer than it takes to diagnose their truck’s carburetor issue. Since his wife Elena died eight years prior, he’d trained himself to keep interactions short, surface-level only. Letting anyone get close felt like cheating, like he was erasing the 32 years they’d built together, pothole by pothole, mortgage payment by mortgage payment. He’d spent so long locked up in his adobe outside Santa Fe, fixing old tools and repainting the same trim over and over, he’d forgotten what it felt like to want to talk to someone.
The first time he notices her, she’s leaning against the split-rail fence surrounding the bar’s parking lot, sipping a mango hard seltzer, work boots caked in red New Mexico mud, flannel tied around her waist over a faded 1977 Led Zeppelin tour tee. He recognizes her from down the road—she moved into the old Miller ranch three weeks prior, had been hauling giant dog kennels in and out of a white conversion van every morning when he went for his 6 a.m. walk. She pushes off the fence and walks straight toward him, no hesitation, her boots kicking up small clouds of dust as she crosses the lot. She stops so close he can smell cedar and citrus on her shirt, can see the faint smudge of engine grease under her left thumbnail, the thin silvery scar slicing through her left eyebrow from a teenaged car wreck she’d later tell him about. “That pinstriping on the hood,” she says, nodding at the hand-painted red flames he’d spent three frigid January weekends on last winter. “You do that yourself? My dad used to do the same thing for hot rods out of his garage in Albuquerque back in the 80s.” Her shoulder brushes his bicep when she leans in to get a better look at the linework, and he flinches like he’s been burned. He’s not used to anyone being that close, not since Elena’s last week in the hospital, when he’d held her hand until her pulse went quiet.
He mumbles a yes, goes back to wiping the bumper, hoping she’ll take the hint and leave. She doesn’t. She leans against the truck bed next to him, close enough that their elbows knock every few seconds when she gestures at passing cars, when she laughs at a dumb joke a guy with a polished 1967 Mustang yells over at them. He finds himself talking before he can stop himself: tells her about working for the state transportation department for 38 years, patching I-25 through blizzards and monsoons, about how Elena used to bring him green chile burritos to his work site every Saturday when he was on overtime, how she’d tease him for getting asphalt in his hair. He doesn’t know why he’s telling her all this. Half of him is screaming to shut up, to go home, to stop acting like some fumbling 16-year-old at his first drive-in, the other half is warm, loose, like he just drank three cold lagers on a 90-degree afternoon. She tells him she runs a mobile large-breed grooming service, moved out here after her ex-husband took a job in Florida and left her with the golden retriever they’d adopted together, that she’s got a 1968 Bronco sitting in her barn that hasn’t run in 12 years, that she’s been trying to find someone who knows old Ford engines to help her get it going without charging her an arm and a leg.
When she asks if he’d be interested in coming out to her place next Saturday to take a look at it, he freezes. His first instinct is to say no, to make up an excuse about needing to fix his back fence, about having a fake doctor’s appointment, about anything that will let him go back to his quiet, empty house, no risk, no guilt. But then she tucks a strand of gray-streaked brown hair behind her ear, and he notices her fingers are calloused, same as his, from working with tools, from hauling 80-pound dog grooming tubs, from living a life that’s not always soft. He realizes he’s been punishing himself for eight years for something Elena would have never wanted. She’d always told him to stop moping, to go out and have fun, to not spend the rest of his life alone after she was gone. He nods before he can overthink it.
She grins, pulls a crumpled grocery receipt out of her jeans pocket, scribbles her address on the back in blue ballpoint, presses it into his palm. Her skin is warm, a little rough, when her fingers brush his. He tucks the receipt into the pocket of his worn work jeans, feels the crinkle of the paper against his thigh when he climbs in his truck to drive home. The sun is dipping below the Sangre de Cristos now, painting the sky pink and tangerine, and he turns up the Johnny Cash on the radio, presses his boot a little harder on the gas.
