Manny Ruiz is 52, spent 28 years as an O’Hare air traffic controller before a near-miss between two regional jets left him with tinnitus so loud some days he could barely hear his own thoughts. He retired to a creaky farmhouse outside Madison three years prior, fills his days tinkering with a 1978 Honda CB750 in his garage and avoiding any unplanned situation. His best friend Ron teases that he’s turned avoiding risk into a full-time job, hasn’t been on a single date since his divorce finalized six years ago.
He’s at the west side farmers’ market on a humid August Saturday, squinting at a stack of peach flats, when the nearby tamale truck generator kicks on loud enough to make his tinnitus spike. He fumbles for his custom molded earplugs, his calloused, grease-stained fingers knocking against someone else’s hand when he reaches for the closest flat of sun-warmed peaches.
He pulls back like he’s been burned. It’s Lila Marlow, Ron’s 41-year-old niece, in town for three months to help her mom recover from a total knee replacement. He’d met her a dozen times when she was a teen, loud and covered in paint, crashing Ron’s annual Fourth of July cookouts to steal beer and skip stones at the lake behind his house. Now she’s grinning at him, her right hand smudged with clay (she runs a Portland pottery studio, Ron said, mugs and bowls that sell for $80 a pop online), her sun-streaked hair pulled back in a messy braid. She’s close enough he can smell lavender soap and the sweet, sharp scent of the peaches between them, her eyes crinkling when she holds his gaze a beat longer than strictly polite.
“Still obsessed with these, huh?” she says, nodding at the peaches. “I remember you ate three in a row at the 2006 cookout, got juice all over your white polo. Ron still teases you about it.”
Manny feels his face heat up. He’s always known Lila was off limits, not just because she’s Ron’s niece, but because she’s 11 years younger, sharp and adventurous, the kind of woman who hikes national parks for fun and posts pottery process videos to 120,000 Instagram followers. He’s the guy who eats the same oatmeal for breakfast every morning, who hasn’t left the state in two years. He should mumble a greeting, grab his peaches, and go home. Instead, he asks how her mom’s recovery is going.
She complains for five minutes about her mom’s refusal to stop gardening even when her knee swells, about the endless Hallmark movies she’s been forced to sit through, before she nods toward the pop-up beer garden two blocks over. “They have that cream ale you like, Ron told me,” she says, her shoulder brushing his when she shifts her weight. “Waste of a good Saturday to sit inside alone, right?”
Manny hesitates. His CB750 is sitting in the garage with a leaky carburetor he’d planned to fix all afternoon. He hasn’t had a beer with anyone other than Ron in six months. But the ringing in his ears has faded to a faint hum, the first time it’s been that quiet in weeks around loud noise. He nods.
They sit at a rickety picnic table in the shade of an oak tree, the beer cold enough to make his fingers tingle, the sun dipping low enough to paint the surrounding cornfields pink and orange. She tells him about a recent pottery class where a student dropped a 20-pound wet clay vase on her foot, leaning in so close her knee presses against his under the table, her breath warm against his cheek when she laughs. He tells her about the time a panicked pilot talked him through landing a plane mid-takeoff, his voice quieter than he intends, and she doesn’t flinch or look bored, just nods and asks follow-up questions.
He’s halfway through his second beer when she goes quiet, her thumb brushing the edge of her plastic cup. “I had a crush on you when I was 17, you know,” she says, so casual he almost thinks he misheard over the distant cover band playing Tom Petty’s *Free Fallin’*. She meets his eyes, no hint of embarrassment. “Thought you were the coolest guy ever when you taught me to skip stones that summer. Ron said if I ever mentioned it he’d ground me for a month, even though I was already in college.”
Manny’s chest feels tight. He’s spent the last two weeks thinking about her, catching himself staring when she stops by Ron’s house to drop off groceries, replaying the way she waved at him from her mom’s porch when he drove by last Tuesday. He’d told himself it was stupid, that it would make things weird with Ron, that he was too old and too boring for someone like her. But the ringing in his ears is completely gone now, all he can hear is crickets chirping in the grass, the soft murmur of people laughing at the next table, her quiet breath next to him.
“I didn’t know that,” he says, his hand brushing hers on the table, slow enough she can pull away if she wants. She doesn’t. She laces her fingers through his, her palm soft and a little calloused at the fingertips from throwing clay, and smiles.
He walks her to her mom’s ranch house an hour later, the peaches sitting forgotten in the canvas bag slung over his shoulder. They stop on the porch, the porch light casting warm yellow light over her face, and she tilts her chin up, her free hand resting on his chest. He kisses her slow, soft at first, then a little deeper when she sighs against his mouth, her fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck.
He pulls back after a minute, his forehead resting against hers. “I don’t want to make things weird with Ron,” he says, his voice low.
She laughs, quiet, and tugs at the hem of his flannel shirt. “Ron’s the one who told me to ask you out. Said you’ve been moping in that garage long enough, needed someone to drag you out of your routine.” She nods toward the front door, the porch swing creaking softly in the breeze behind her. “Mom’s at book club until 10. You want to come in and see the mug I made you?”
He squeezes her hand, steps over the porch threshold behind her, the faint hum of his tinnitus still nowhere to be found.
