Russ Hatch is 62, spent 32 years on Oregon wildland fire crews, retired three years back, has a scar that runs from his left eyebrow to his hairline from a 2017 blaze outside Bend. His biggest flaw is he’s stubborn to a fault, refuses to let anyone see him as anything other than self-sufficient, hasn’t so much as had coffee with a woman since his wife Linda passed from ovarian cancer in 2015. He’d told his old crew he’d skip the annual fire department fundraiser again this year, but they showed up on his porch with a six pack of his favorite hazy IPA and threatened to mow his lawn with a weed whacker if he didn’t come, so he caved.
He’s leaning against a splintered pine picnic table at the edge of the beer garden, boots planted in patchy white clover, when she walks up. He knows who she is: Marnie Cole, the new forest service administrative coordinator who moved to town last fall, the one he’d bailed on three trail maintenance volunteer shifts for because he couldn’t stop staring at the way her forearms flex when she hefts a chainsaw over her shoulder, the one he’d written off as too young, too bright, too much for a guy who still sleeps with his wife’s old plaid flannel shirt under his pillow.
She’s reaching for the stack of paper napkins on the table six inches from his hand when their knuckles brush. His skin is calloused, sun-cracked from decades of working in 100-degree heat; hers are cool, dotted with a few freckles, have a faint rough patch at the base of her index finger he recognizes from holding mountain bike handlebars for hours on end. He yanks his hand back like he touched a hot stove, and she huffs a laugh, holding his eye contact instead of looking away. Her eyes are hazel, flecked with pine green, and she’s wearing a faded forest service hoodie and cutoff jeans that show a thin, pale scar on her left calf from a trail crash last winter.
Russ grunts, takes a long sip of his beer to avoid talking. He’s been kicking himself for weeks for being so rude to her every time they crossed paths at the hardware store or the post office, but every time he thought about striking up a conversation, a voice in his head screamed that he was betraying Linda, that he was a sad old creep chasing a woman half his age.
“For the record,” she says, tilting her head so the golden hour sun hits the streaks of silver in her auburn hair, “I’m 54. My kid is a junior at OSU. I know you thought I was in my 30s, everyone does at first.” He flinches, like she read his mind, and she laughs again, warm, no malice in it. “You’re not as subtle as you think you are, Hatch. The guys on your old crew told me you’ve been avoiding the volunteer days ‘cause you don’t know how to talk to me.”
He feels his face heat up, something he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager fumbling through his first date at the drive-in. The guilt nags at him, sharp, at first—this is wrong, you shouldn’t be enjoying this—but then she sits down on the bench next to him, her bare knee brushing his under the table, and he doesn’t pull away. She tells him her ex husband left her three years ago for a 28-year-old who sold luxury vacation homes in Sunriver, that she moved to this small town to get away from the country club gossip, that she’d seen the photos of him and Linda on the wall at the fire station, that she didn’t expect anything from him, just wanted to stop getting the cold shoulder every time they crossed paths.
Russ talks for the next hour, more than he’s talked to anyone in months. He tells her about the time his crew got stuck in a burn zone for three days in 2009, surviving on granola bars and melted Gatorade, about Linda’s obsession with growing heirloom tomatoes that never ripened before the first frost, about how he’d spent the last eight years convinced he’d never feel anything but half-alive again. She listens, nods, asks questions that don’t feel like pity, and when the band wraps up their last set and the crowd starts filtering out to their trucks, she leans in so close her breath brushes his ear.
“You gonna ask me to get that burger you’ve been thinking about since I sat down, or am I gonna have to ask you?” she says, and he snorts, surprised, and nods so fast he almost knocks over his empty beer bottle.
He holds the dented chain link gate to the beer garden open for her, and her shoulder brushes his chest when she walks through, warm through the thin fabric of his old fire department hoodie. The guilt is still there, faint, but it’s not loud anymore, not enough to drown out the quiet buzz of excitement in his chest. He tucks his free hand into his jacket pocket, already planning the backroad route to the 24/7 diner on the edge of town that still makes onion rings the way he likes them.
