Manny Ruiz is 57, spent 31 years as an air show pyrotechnician before retiring to a one-bedroom Torch Lake cabin three years after his wife Jan died of ovarian cancer. His biggest flaw? He’d rather rewire a 1978 Evinrude outboard in subzero weather than make small talk with the retirees and summer tourists crowding the town’s weekly community events. He only showed up to the fire department’s annual chili cookoff because his 72-year-old retired nurse neighbor Dottie baked him three peach pies the week prior, when he blew out his knee clearing fallen trees from his driveway, and he owed her a favor.
He leans against the beer tent’s support post, half-eaten plate of his smoked brisket chili in one hand, cold draft IPA in the other, plotting his escape before the mandatory raffle starts, when the canvas tent flap blows hard in an October gust and a woman carrying a case of hard seltzer slams into his left side. Cold aluminum presses through his thin work flannel, sending a shiver up his ribs, and he catches her elbow before she trips over the cinder block holding the tent leg down. She smells like pine dish soap and spiked cider, the same scent he remembers from 1998, when he pulled her out of misfired shell debris at the Oshkosh air show, when she was 24 and Jan teased him for three weeks straight about stammering every time she walked into the pyrotechnics tent.
She blinks, squints at him for two full seconds, then grins so wide the crinkles at her eye corners catch the golden hour sun filtering through the tent mesh. Her hair is streaked with silver now, tied back with a worn leather thong, and a faint white scar snakes across her left wrist, the mark left by a firework casing shard that day in Oshkosh. She leans in so her shoulder presses firm to his bicep to yell over the bluegrass band twanging on the small stage by the food trucks, and he feels her warmth through his shirt. “Manny Ruiz? I thought you moved to Alaska or some wild shit after Jan passed,” she says, her voice rough from years of yelling over jet engines and rescue dog barks, her hand still resting light on his forearm where he caught her.
He freezes half a second, old guilt coiling tight in his gut. He’d carried a dumb, lingering crush on Lila Carter for 25 years, even when he was happily married, even when Jan teased him that Lila was the only other person on the planet who thought his timed detonation puns were funny. He’d always thought acting on that crush, even after Jan was gone, was unforgivable betrayal, the kind of move that made him the same sort of guy he’d mocked back in his air show days: men who traded in their wives for younger models the second they hit 50.
He mumbles that he moved to Michigan instead, fixes old fishing boats for extra cash, keeps to himself mostly, and she laughs, slapping his arm lightly, her calloused palm (from training search and rescue dogs, she explains, she moved back six months prior to care for her mom with early onset dementia) lingering on his bicep a beat longer than necessary. She grabs a seltzer from the case, pops the top, and leans back against the tent post beside him, their ankles brushing every time someone squeezes past into the tent.
They talk for an hour, first about old air show war stories: the time a flock of geese flew through a firework display and left the crowd coated in goose down and ash, the time Jan snuck tequila into the team hotel and they stayed up until 4 a.m. drawing mustaches on jet pilots’ promo photos. Then they talk about Jan, how Lila spoke to her three weeks before she died, how Jan told her if she ever ended up back in Michigan, she had to look Manny up, that he’d spend his life hiding in his cabin if someone didn’t drag him out. The tight coil of guilt in his gut loosens so fast he feels lightheaded. He’d spent so long convinced he was honoring Jan by staying alone, he never stopped to think she’d want him to be happy.
The cookoff wraps up, the crowd thins, the bluegrass band packs their gear, and Lila tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear, her eyes glinting when she asks if he still has that beat up photo album of air show polaroids he used to carry in his work bag. He says he does, stashed in a garage storage bin along with the old detonator Jan engraved with his name for their 10th anniversary. He nods toward the parking lot, his hand brushing hers when he gestures, and when she doesn’t pull away, he laces their fingers together, their calloused palms fitting like they were made to. They walk to his beat up Ford F150, oak leaves crunching under their boots, distant lake waves humming behind them. He opens the passenger door for her, and when she climbs in, she leans over the center console to kiss him quick, seltzer and cinnamon on her lips. He turns the key, the truck rumbles to life, and he pulls out of the lot toward his cabin.
