Javier Ruiz, 53, spent most days covered in chili oil and vinegar, running his small-batch hot sauce brand out of the two-car garage attached to his East Austin bungalow. He’d quit his 22-year line cook gig at a beloved local Tex-Mex spot three years prior, when the new out-of-state owners jacked up margarita prices and cut health insurance for the back-of-house staff. For eight years, since his ex-wife left him for a remote-working software sales guy who’d moved to Austin from Portland, he’d kept his social circle narrow: his 19-year-old daughter when she came home from Texas State, his old line cook buddy Manny for occasional Sunday fishing trips, and the regulars at the Saturday farmers market where he sold his sauce. He avoided neighborhood events like the plague, wrote them off as cringey singles traps for people who didn’t have better things to do with their weekends. The only reason he showed up to the annual block party wing contest was the $500 grand prize, money he could put toward a new industrial blender for his garage.
He was perched by a rusted propane fryer, grease flecked on the rolled-up sleeves of his faded gray work shirt, wiping his hands on his frayed denim apron slung over worn work boots, when Clara Bennett walked up. She was 49, head of the neighborhood association, freshly divorced from the local high school football coach three weeks prior, and Javier had nursed a stupid, quiet crush on her for two full years, ever since she’d helped him drag a 50-pound sack of habaneros from his truck to his garage when he’d thrown his back out. Everyone on the block still treated her like she was off limits, like she needed six months of mourning before anyone so much as asked her if she wanted a beer, but Javier had always liked how unapologetic she was, how she yelled at the city council for letting potholes sit for months, how she brought stray cats to the vet out of her own pocket.
She was wearing a faded burnt orange UT tank top, frayed cutoff shorts, and scuffed cowboy boots, a streak of silver cutting through the dark brown hair pulled back in a loose braid. She leaned in to sniff the open crockpot of habanero-mango glaze he’d stirred up for the contest, her bare shoulder brushing his tanned, calloused bicep, and he caught a whiff of coconut sunscreen and spearmint gum over the smell of fried chicken and charcoal smoke drifting through the August humidity. She held eye contact longer than polite, her dark brown eyes crinkling at the corners, and said she’d been buying his extra hot ghost pepper sauce from the farmers market for months, put it on her egg and avocado tacos every Saturday morning.
Javier fumbled his metal tongs, dropped them clattering to the gravel driveway, and when he bent to grab them, she leaned down too, their hands brushing as they both reached for the handle. The callus on her palm, from years of fixing her own fence and hauling mulch for the community garden, scraped against his, and he felt a jolt shoot up his arm that had nothing to do with the static from the dry Texas heat. He mumbled a stupid joke about how the sauce was so hot it’d melt the tongue off anyone who didn’t grow up eating his abuela’s chile rellenos, and she laughed so hard she snort-laughed, clapping a hand over her mouth, her shoulder bumping his again.
He’d spent two years talking himself out of even saying more than two words to her, convinced she was too put-together, too involved in the neighborhood, too far out of his league for a guy who spent half his time covered in chili stains and talking to his rescue pit bull while he bottled sauce. He’d told himself making a move would make the whole block awkward, that he was better off alone, that he didn’t need the hassle of another relationship that would end with someone packing a suitcase and driving west. But she didn’t leave after that. She lingered, leaning against the wooden fence next to his fryer, asking him about how he developed the glaze, about the time he’d burned a batch of Carolina reaper sauce so bad the entire neighborhood smelled like pepper spray for three hours, nodding like she actually cared what he had to say.
Javier froze for half a second, all the excuses he’d been rehearsing for two years dying in his throat. He nodded, so fast he almost knocked his baseball cap askew, and told her he’d be there at 7, not to eat all the tacos before he showed up.
