Rafe Marquez, 62, spent 38 years chasing wildfires across 11 Western states as a hotshot crew supervisor, retired three years after his wife Elouise died of ovarian cancer, settled into the tiny cabin they’d built outside Salida, Colorado, that they’d only gotten to live in together for six months. He’d shown up to the town’s annual chili cookoff only to drop off Elouise’s famous green chili, the recipe she’d scribbled on a grease-stained index card before she got too sick to cook, for her best friend Marnie to enter. He planned to leave before anyone could corner him with pitying small talk, or worse, try to set him up with the new librarian everyone in town had been chattering about for the last three months.
He was halfway to his beat-up 2012 Ford F-150, boots crunching over scattered peanut shells and discarded paper plates, when he tripped over a rolling cooler full of root beer, arms windmilling before a warm, firm hand wrapped around his left bicep, steadying him. “Easy there, fireman,” a low, dry voice said, and he looked down to see Elara Voss, the librarian, he recognized her from the one time he’d driven past the library and seen her hauling a stack of books out to the free little shelf on the sidewalk. She was 58, with streaks of silver in her dark wavy hair, a silver pine needle ring on the hand holding his arm, the scent of cedar and jasmine curling off her flannel shirt, faint enough that he had to lean in a little to catch it. She was holding a mason jar of iced peach tea, chipped pale blue nail polish on her fingers, and she was smiling like she didn’t feel sorry for him, like she didn’t even know the story of his dead wife that everyone in town had memorized.
For the first 10 minutes, he was short, gruff, answering her questions with one or two words, half convinced this was some setup Marnie had cooked up, angry at the idea that anyone thought he needed to be fixed, that anyone thought Elouise was replaceable. But she didn’t push, didn’t pry, just flipped open one of the poetry books and pointed to a note Elouise had written next to a Gary Snyder poem: Rafe tried to read this to me on our 25th anniversary, got so choked up he couldn’t finish, had to go chop wood for an hour to calm down. He laughed, a real laugh, the kind he hadn’t let out in months, and when their knees brushed under the table, the rough denim of his work jeans against her soft corduroy pants, he didn’t shift away. She asked about the thin, pale scar slicing across his left cheekbone, from a 2017 fire outside Bend, Oregon, when a burning pine branch had snapped off and grazed him, and he told her the story, making a dry joke about how the pine sap that got in the cut had tasted better than half the red chili entries at the cookoff that year.
She leaned in a little then, elbows on the table, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her breath on his jaw when she said she knew what it felt like to be half a person walking around. Her ex-husband had left her after 32 years of marriage for a 28-year-old admin he’d met at a tech conference, she said, she’d moved to Salida to get away from everyone who kept asking her if she was okay, everyone who kept treating her like she was broken. For a second, Rafe’s throat felt tight, the old guilt warring with the sharp, quiet spark of desire he’d been pushing down since she’d caught his arm, the disgust he’d felt at the idea of being with anyone other than Elouise melting away, slow, like frost on a spring morning. He lifted his hand, slow, like he was approaching a skittish deer, and brushed a strand of windblown hair off her face, his calloused fingertips grazing her warm cheek. She didn’t flinch, just held his gaze, her hazel eyes flecked with gold, and smiled that same dry, easy smile.
