Javi Mendez is 53, spent 22 years with Border Patrol’s K9 unit, retired three years back to run a 10-acre native cactus nursery southeast of Tucson. His biggest flaw, if you ask his older sister, is that he’d rather spend 12 hours a day digging caliche holes for saguaro transplants than make small talk with anyone who isn’t a lizard or a stray barn cat. He’d skipped every local street fair, potluck, and community meeting since his wife left him for a travel nurse four years prior, convinced half the town saw him as a washed-up, sad-sack cautionary tale for men who put their jobs before their marriages. He only showed up to this one because the local 4H had begged him to donate a rare dwarf saguaro seedling for their silent auction, and he couldn’t say no to the 12-year-old who’d showed up at his nursery last week with a plate of her abuela’s chewy chocolate chip cookies.
He’s halfway to his truck, sun low enough that orange light paints the surrounding rock walls soft pink, when he turns a corner between the cotton candy stand and the 4H livestock display and slams right into someone holding a giant iced chamoy margarita. Half the drink sloshes down the front of his sun-faded gray work shirt, the sticky, sour-sweet liquid seeping through the fabric to cool his chest. He’s already apologizing, fumbling for the frayed rag in his back pocket, when he looks up and realizes it’s Lena. Lena, his ex-wife’s first cousin, the woman he’d only ever exchanged stiff, polite hellos with at family weddings and Christmas dinners for 18 years, the one he’d spent two decades actively not looking at for fear his ex would notice the way his chest went tight whenever she walked in a room. She’s 47, runs the desert wildlife rehab 20 minutes north of his property, and he’d heard she got bit by a rattlesnake last spring while rescuing a baby bobcat, spent three days in the hospital.
She laughs, not mean, the sound rough and warm over the mariachi band playing two booths over, and leans in without asking, dabbing at the sticky spot on his shirt with a crumpled paper napkin pulled from her jeans pocket. She’s close enough that he can smell the jasmine sunscreen she’s wearing, mixed with the faint, earthy scent of snake bedding that sticks to her clothes, and her forearm brushes the hair on his chest when she reaches a little lower to get a spot near his waistband. He freezes, his hands hovering half an inch from her hips, because this is the closest they’ve ever been, and he can see the tiny silver streak in her dark wavy hair, the thin scar along her left jaw from the snake bite, the flecks of gold in her dark brown eyes when she looks up at him and holds eye contact longer than any polite family member ever would. “Don’t worry about the shirt,” she says, grinning, the corner of her mouth tugging up higher on the scarred side. “I owe you, anyway. I’ve been meaning to stop by your nursery for months to get a few prickly pear pads for my desert tortoise enclosure, but I was scared you’d think I was using the family connection to beg for a discount.”
His first instinct is to make an excuse, say he’s swamped with transplant jobs all week, say he doesn’t do discounts for anyone, say it’s too weird. He’s spent four years building walls, telling himself he doesn’t need anyone, telling himself getting involved with anyone related to his ex would be the kind of small town drama he’d never live down. But she’s still standing close, her shoulder brushing his, and when a group of kids on razor scooters zoom past, she grabs his bicep to steady herself, and he can feel the calluses on her palm from handling hawk talons and snake hooks. He can’t remember the last time a woman touched him like she wasn’t afraid he’d break. He agrees to walk with her to the elote truck, says he’ll even throw in the prickly pear pads for free if she buys him a cup of elote with extra chili powder and cotija.
They sit on a curb at the edge of the fairgrounds, away from the crowd, and she asks him about Max, his old K9 partner, the one he’d brought to family barbecues back when he was still married. He tells her Max passed last month, old age, 12 years old, buried him out at the nursery under a giant saguaro that blooms bright white every May. His throat gets tight when he says it; he hasn’t talked about Max to anyone, hasn’t even told his sister yet. She doesn’t say the hollow “I’m sorry” everyone else falls back on, just reaches over and laces her fingers through his, squeezes once, her hand warm and rough against his, which is crisscrossed with tiny scars from cactus spines. In that second, all the stupid, self-imposed rules he’s been living by for four years melt away. He doesn’t care if someone from town sees them, doesn’t care if his ex hears about it, doesn’t care about any of the gossip that might bubble up at the next grocery store run.
When the fair starts to wrap up, the mariachi band packs up their instruments, the food vendors flip off their neon signs, she asks him if he wants to come back to her place. Says she has a litter of four baby desert foxes that just opened their eyes three days ago, knows he used to bring Max out to her place to visit the rescue dogs when he was still on the force. He doesn’t hesitate, just nods, grabs their empty elote cups to toss in the nearby trash can. She leads him to her beat up rusted 4Runner, the back window plastered with rescue animal stickers, and when he opens the passenger door for her, she tugs him down by the front of his still-sticky shirt for a quick, soft kiss that tastes like lime and chamoy and the sour cherry Sour Patch Kid she’d been nibbling on earlier. He climbs into the driver’s seat when she tosses him the keys, turns the key in the ignition, and the radio cuts on to an old Tejano track he hasn’t heard since he was a teenager, playing just loud enough to cover the sound of both of them laughing when a baby roadrunner skitters across the dirt road in front of them.
