Rafe Marquez, 62, spent 28 years as a U.S. Forest Service fire spotter, manning remote Sierra Nevada lookouts for weeks at a stretch before retiring to western Colorado after his wife’s 2015 death. His biggest flaw is a stubborn refusal to let anyone in; he’s turned down three separate offers of help with his 1978 F-150 rebuild, avoids town events unless the local volunteer fire department strong-arms him into showing up, and has written off the county’s new senior wellness initiative as a waste of taxpayer money aimed at people too soft to handle their own scrapes and colds.
He’s leaning against the scuffed pine bar at the fire department’s end-of-summer cookout, half-drinking a wheat beer and pretending to scroll through his phone to avoid small talk, when Lena Hale trips over a dented cooler at his feet. She’s the new county public health nurse, 58, moved to town three months prior, and he’d only ever spoken to her once before, when he’d come in for a tetanus shot after slicing his hand open on a rusted truck bolt. She’s carrying a paper plate piled high with peach cobbler, and when she stumbles, her free hand slams flat to his grease-stained work shirt forearm, the cobbler tilting so far a dollop of whipped cream almost slides onto his jeans. He catches the plate with his free hand before it can spill, steadying her by the elbow with the other.
The first thing he notices is the smell: lavender hand cream mixed with hickory grill smoke and the faint, sweet tang of the cobbler in his hand. Her palm is warm through the thin cotton of his shirt, calloused at the fingertips, and when she looks up at him, laughing at her own clumsiness, he spots the thin silver scar slicing through her left eyebrow, old and faded. “Sorry about that,” she says, brushing a strand of honey-blonde hair out of her face, her hand lingering on his arm for half a beat longer than necessary before she pulls away. “Some kid left that cooler right in the walkway, and I was too busy staring at the prize table to watch my feet.”
He grunts, handing her the plate, already mentally drafting an excuse to leave before she can start pestering him about the free blood pressure screenings she’s been setting up at the grocery store. But she doesn’t mention screenings. She nods at the dark grease stain streaked across the front of his shirt, right over the pocket where he keeps his list of truck parts. “That’s the same stain you had when you came in for that tetanus shot,” she says, grinning. “I’m guessing the F-150 still isn’t running, then?”
He blinks, surprised she remembers. Most people in town barely remember his name. They start talking, leaning against the bar side by side, and he learns her dad was a mechanic in Des Moines, that she grew up rebuilding Chevy pickups with him in their garage before she went to nursing school, that she moved to Colorado after her husband died of a heart attack four years prior because she’d always wanted to hike the Colorado Trail. Every time someone squeezes past the narrow bar walkway, her shoulder brushes his, warm and solid, and he finds himself leaning in a little closer when she talks, just to hear her over the roar of the crowd and the country music playing over the speakers.
Part of him is screaming to leave. He hasn’t had a conversation this easy with anyone in years, and that terrifies him; he’s spent almost a decade building walls around himself, convinced that letting someone in would just mean more heartbreak down the line. The other part of him doesn’t want her to stop talking. He finds himself telling her about the summer he spent manning a lookout 10 miles from the nearest paved road, about the way the sun set over the Sierras looked like someone had spilled a bucket of orange and pink paint across the sky, about how he’d found a litter of feral kittens under his porch last winter and ended up keeping two of them.
The sky opens up out of nowhere, fat cold raindrops slamming into the tin roof of the bar’s outdoor overhang so loud it drowns out the music. Everyone around them scrambles for cover, and Lena shivers, her thin cardigan no match for the sudden chill. Rafe doesn’t think before he yanks his oilskin work coat off, draping it over her shoulders, his knuckles brushing the soft skin of her jaw when he adjusts the collar so it covers her neck. For three seconds, they’re standing so close he can smell the coconut shampoo in her hair, their faces only a foot apart, no one else near enough to see them. She holds his eye contact, no teasing smile this time, just a soft, quiet look he hasn’t seen on anyone’s face since his wife died. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” she says, her voice low enough only he can hear it. “When you get that F-150 running, can I go for a ride? I haven’t been in a truck that old since my dad sold his 1976 Silverado back in 2002.”
He freezes for half a second, the part of him that’s been running from connection for 8 years warring with the part of him that’s been lonely for just as long. Then he nods, so fast he almost knocks his baseball cap askew. “Yeah,” he says. “I’d like that.”
The rain lets up 10 minutes later, and she pulls a pen out of her purse, scrawling her phone number on the back of a crumpled senior wellness flyer she pulls out of her pocket, handing it to him. “Text me when you’re almost done with the truck,” she says, grinning as she hands him the flyer. “And for the record, the wellness screenings are not a waste of time. I’ll even bring you a slice of cobbler if you come to one next week.”
He tucks the flyer into his work shirt pocket, right next to his list of truck parts, when he gets in his beat-up current pickup to drive home. He stops at the diner on the way back to his cabin, orders a slice of peach cobbler to go, and eats it while he sits in the parking lot, watching the last of the storm clouds roll away over the Book Cliffs. He pops a bite of warm, cinnamon-sweet cobbler into his mouth, and for the first time in as long as he can remember, he doesn’t dread getting out of bed the next morning.
