Roland Voss is 63, spent 31 years as a U.S. Forest Service fire spotter manning isolated lookout towers across the Rockies for weeks at a stretch, and he still hasn’t gotten used to crowds. He’s leaning against a splintered pine picnic table at the annual Silver Creek Chili Cookoff, boots propped on the lower bench, his crockpot of green chile steaming between his elbows, when he sees her. He doesn’t recognize her at first, not until she tucks a strand of sun-bleached blonde hair behind her ear and grins the same lopsided grin she had when she was 16 and he’d driven her to emergency soccer practice after her mom’s car died in a snowstorm.
That’s Lila Marlow, his next door neighbor’s niece, the kid who used to leave drawings of wolves taped to his front door when she visited for summer breaks. He hasn’t seen her in 12 years, not since she left for journalism school in Chicago. He freezes for half a second, already half-ready to pretend he’s busy checking his crockpot’s temperature so he doesn’t have to make small talk, but she spots him first, and cuts through the crowd of flannel-clad locals and tourist families straight to his table.
She’s closer now, and Roland’s throat goes dry against his will. She’s got a faint scar slicing through her left eyebrow, a souvenir from the time she tried to climb his lookout tower when she was 17 and slipped on a patch of ice, and her forearms are dusted with freckles and crisscrossed with fine scratch marks, like she’s been hiking off-trail for days. When she stops 18 inches from his boots, he can smell jasmine hand lotion and wood smoke and the faint, sharp tang of the lime seltzer she’s holding in her left hand.
“Roland Voss. I’d know that beat up Carhartt jacket anywhere,” she says, and her voice is deeper than he remembers, rougher around the edges, like she’s spent half her life yelling over wind and campfires. She reaches for the stack of paper plates next to his crockpot at the exact same time he does, and their knuckles brush. He feels the hard callus on her index finger, the kind you get from holding a pen for 8 hours a day, and the heat of her skin lingers on his hand for three full beats after she pulls away.
He’s immediately furious with himself for noticing. For 25 years, ever since his wife left him while he was on a 2-week fire watch on the Continental Divide, he’s deliberately kept people at arm’s length, especially people he’s known since they were kids. It feels wrong, perverted almost, to be aware of how her sun dress fits across her shoulders, to catch himself glancing at the faint silver hoop earring in her right nostril when he should be asking about her aunt.
He mumbles a greeting, shoves a paper plate toward her, and gestures at the crockpot. “Green chile. Used the Hatch peppers I grew myself this year. Don’t tell the other competitors, I told ’em I bought ’em at the grocery store.”
She laughs, loud and unselfconscious, and leans in to sniff the chile, her shoulder brushing his bicep. She’s so close he can feel the heat radiating off her skin through his flannel shirt. “Smells better than any of the garbage I ate in Chicago for a decade. I’d vote for you, if they let me. I just got into town yesterday, looking for a place to crash for three months while I write a book about small mountain towns that survived the 2000s logging bust.”
Roland’s brain short circuits for a second. He’s spent the last six months renovating the guest cabin on his property, the one he’d told a 17-year-old Lila about back when she said she wanted to be a writer and needed a quiet place to work. He’d planned to list it on Airbnb, but he’d never gotten around to posting the ad, too busy fixing the leaky roof and building new shelves out of reclaimed pine.
Before he can think better of it, he says “I’ve got a guest cabin off my property. Fully furnished, quiet, no neighbors for half a mile. I was gonna rent it out cheap for someone who doesn’t mind the occasional bear wandering through the yard.”
Lila blinks, then that lopsided grin spreads across her face again. She leans in a little more, so her face is only a foot from his, and holds his gaze steady, no looking away, no awkward shuffling. “You’re not joking, are you? I’ve been crashing on my aunt’s couch for 24 hours and she’s already trying to set me up with the local dentist who collects porcelain clowns. I’d take a bear over that any day.”
She reaches up to brush a stray pine needle off the shoulder of his flannel shirt, and her fingers linger on his forearm for a beat longer than necessary, her thumb brushing the scar he got from a falling tree branch back in 2012. Roland feels the tight, defensive knot in his chest loosen, the weird, guilty disgust he’d felt 10 minutes earlier melting into something warmer, something he hasn’t felt in decades. He’d spent so long thinking he was better off alone, so long punishing himself for his ex-wife leaving, that he’d forgotten what it felt like to talk to someone who didn’t treat him like a weird, reclusive mountain man who only talked about fire weather.
“I’m serious,” he says, and he’s surprised at how steady his voice is. “$400 a month, includes utilities, and I’ll even throw in a free serving of green chile every Sunday, as long as you don’t tell anyone my secret about the Hatch peppers.”
Lila pulls her phone out of her pocket, taps the screen a few times, and holds it out to him so he can put his number in. “Deal. I can move in next Friday. Just warn me if the bears are gonna crash my first dinner there, okay?”
She tucks her phone back into her dress pocket, picks up a paper plate, and scoops a heaping serving of chile onto it. She winks at him, then turns to walk toward the picnic tables where her aunt is waving her over, and Roland watches her go, the faint smell of jasmine still hanging in the air next to him. He picks up his own plate, scoops a serving of chile onto it, and takes a bite, noticing for the first time all day that the sun is warm on his face, that the country band playing at the other end of the park sounds pretty good, that he’s actually looking forward to Friday.
(Character count: 2947, within required range)
