Rafe Calderon, 62, retired wildland firefighter crew boss, hadn’t spoken more than three words to anyone at the Bend Saturday farmers market in the three years he’d been making the weekly trip for stone fruit and sourdough. He liked the routine, no small talk, no prying questions about why he still wore a faded USFS hat even though he’d hung up his fire pack eight years prior, right after his wife’s lung cancer diagnosis turned their last six months together into a blur of hospital waiting rooms and bad instant coffee. His biggest flaw, as his old crew chief had put it before retiring to Arizona, was that he’d turned being a widower into a personality trait, walling himself off in his off-grid cabin outside town, fixing vintage chainsaws for local loggers and hobbyists for extra cash, turning down every invite to the volunteer fire department’s cookouts and fish fries. He’d convinced himself he was fine alone, that the company of his two hound dogs and the pine trees edging his property was all he needed.
That changed on a 92-degree July Saturday, when the peach stand he usually hit first was closed, a handwritten sign taped to the empty folding table saying the owner had to rush his kid to the ER for a broken arm. Rafe grumbled, shifting the weight of his canvas tote over one shoulder, and had to cut between the honey stand and the heirloom tomato booth he’d deliberately avoided for two years straight. He’d noticed the woman running it, of course, dark hair streaked with silver pulled back in a frayed bandana, sun freckles dusting her nose, perpetually smudged green stains under her fingernails from tying up tomato vines. Everyone in town called her Marnie, said her husband had left her for a 28-year-old dental hygienist two years prior, that she didn’t want to be bothered, that any guy who tried to ask her out was just asking to get shut down hard.
He was six inches from her booth when he spotted a jar of pickled okra on the edge of the table, the same kind his wife used to can every fall, and he reached for it without thinking. Her hand closed around the jar at the exact same time. Their knuckles brushed. His were calloused, crisscrossed with thin white scars from old fire burns and chainsaw nicks, hers were softer, warm from the sun, a faint smudge of tomato pulp on the side of her index finger. He jerked his hand back like he’d touched a hot stove, mumbled an apology, and when he looked up she was smiling, the corners of her eyes crinkling so deep he could see tiny laugh lines fanning out to her temples. The air around her smelled like ripe basil, coconut sunblock, and the sharp, sweet tang of overripe cherries from the stand next door.
“Y’know, I save these jars for regulars,” she said, twisting the jar in her hand and holding it out to him. Her voice was low, a little rough, like she spent half her days yelling across fields to her farm hands. “But I’ve seen you walk past my booth every Saturday for two years without even glancing at the tomatoes. Figured you earned it.”
Rafe froze, his throat going dry. He’d thought he was being invisible, ducking his head, keeping to the edge of the market paths. He didn’t know she’d been watching him. The two parts of his brain warred with each other, one half screaming that he should take the jar, pay her, and hightail it back to his cabin before he did something stupid like ask her out, the other half buzzing with a warmth he hadn’t felt in close to a decade, the kind of giddy, nervous spark he’d only felt once before, when he’d asked his wife to prom back in 1979. He hated that he was even considering it, hated that he was breaking the promise he’d made to himself to never put anyone else in the position of having to deal with his mood swings, his tendency to disappear into the woods for three days when fire season rolls around, his scarred up hands and the permanent cough he’d picked up from breathing in too much smoke over 38 years on the line.
“I fix chainsaws,” he blurted out, before he could stop himself, nodding at the small Stihl keychain hanging off the strap of her canvas apron. “That model’s a pain in the ass to tune up. If it ever gives you trouble, I do house calls for half the price the shop in town charges.”
She laughed, a loud, throaty sound that cut through the hum of the market crowd, and leaned forward against the table, close enough that he could smell the spearmint gum she was chewing. “I know who you are, Rafe. You fixed my uncle Earl’s 1987 Stihl last spring, got it running like new after three different shops told him it was trash. I’ve been meaning to track you down to ask you to look at the two we use for clearing brush out at the farm.” She paused, tilting her head, and held his eye contact for three long, slow beats, no awkward looking away, no nervous fidgeting. “Was just waiting for you to stop being scared to talk to me first.”
The tension that had been coiled in his shoulders since he walked up to the booth unspooled all at once. He laughed, a rough, rusty sound he hadn’t heard come out of his own mouth in years, and took the jar of okra from her hand, their fingers brushing again, deliberate this time, no pulling away. “You gonna make me pay for this okra, or is it a down payment for the chainsaw work?” he asked, grinning.
“Half off the okra,” she said, winking, and grabbed a sharpie from the pocket of her apron, scribbling her cell number on a scrap of brown paper that had faint tomato juice smudges along the edge. “And if you bring a six pack of that dark IPA the taphouse down the road sells when you come out to the farm next weekend, I’ll even throw in a free pound of sun golds. And dinner, if you don’t mind eating grilled corn and burgers that are a little burnt around the edges.”
He took the scrap of paper from her, folded it carefully, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his work flannel, right over his heart. He paid for the okra, waved when she yelled that she’d text him her address later, and walked back to his beat up 1998 Ford F-150, the canvas tote slung over his shoulder, the jar of pickled okra clinking against the loaf of sourdough he’d picked up on the way. When he climbed into the driver’s seat, he pulled the scrap of paper out to look at it again, running a calloused finger over the smudged numbers, and one of the sun gold tomatoes she’d slipped into his tote when he wasn’t looking fell out, bounced off the steering wheel, and landed in the open cupholder, bright orange and warm from sitting in the sun.
