Clay Bennett, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service ranger, had only agreed to staff the Bitterroot Backcountry Association booth at the town’s summer street fair to get his niece off his back. Seven years a widower, he’d spent most of that time holed up in his cabin 12 miles outside town, fixing fences, cutting firewood, and avoiding any gathering where he’d have to make small talk with strangers. The scar slicing across his left knuckle, a souvenir from a grizzly cub that’d swiped at him during a 2019 trail rescue, rubbed raw against the frayed cuff of his Carhartt jacket as he ducked into the beer garden tent, desperate for a break from retirees asking him if he’d ever seen a wolf up close.
He turned, and there she was. Maren Hale, 56, ex-wife of his former patrol partner Judd, the man he’d stopped speaking to after a 2011 rescue mission gone wrong that left Judd with a permanent limp and a grudge so thick he’d threatened to break Clay’s jaw if he ever showed his face within 10 miles of their old house. She’d cut her hair since he’d last seen her, wavy auburn streaked with silver that fell just above her shoulders, and she smelled like lavender and old paper, the latter a dead giveaway she was the one who’d opened the vintage bookstore downtown three months prior. He’d seen the sign for it when he drove into town for groceries, but he’d never dared go inside, convinced Judd still lived there, still hated him.
She ordered a seltzer with lime, leaning against the pole next to him so their elbows brushed every time she shifted her weight. She told him she’d divorced Judd eight years prior, got sick of his drinking and his anger, moved to town six months ago to open the store. She’d seen his name on the ranger booth flyer earlier that afternoon, she said, and had been looking for him ever since. He tensed up at first, every old loyalty pinging in his chest, half ready to mumble an excuse and leave. But then she laughed at a dumb joke he made about the fair’s terrible deep-fried food, and her knee brushed his when they sat down at a sticky plastic table, and he found himself staying.
They talked for an hour, leaning in over the table so they could hear each other over the band. She told him about the first edition Hemingway she’d found in a box of donations the week prior, he told her about the herd of bighorn sheep he’d spotted on a hike the month before. Her hand brushed his when she reached across the table to grab a napkin, and he didn’t pull away, even though every old instinct screamed that this was wrong, that Judd would lose his mind if he saw them. He’d always liked her, back when they were patrolling together, had even brought her a jar of wild huckleberries when she was pregnant with her younger kid, a move that had led to Judd screaming at him for 20 minutes in the station parking lot for “crossing a line.”
When the band started playing an even louder set, she leaned in so her mouth was inches from his ear, her breath warm against his skin, and asked if he wanted to walk down to the river to get away from the noise. He hesitated for half a second, the old guilt coiling in his gut, then nodded. They walked past the food booths, past the group of teens running around with glow sticks, the gravel of the river path crunching under their work boots. She stopped halfway to the bank to pick a wild pink rose, reaching up to tuck it behind his ear, her fingers brushing the stubble on his jaw when she did. He blushed, and she laughed, the sound light over the gurgle of the river.
He admitted it then, sitting down next to her on a fallen cottonwood log half-buried in the sand, that he’d thought about her off and on for years, that he’d felt guilty for it every single time. She smiled, lacing her fingers through his, the callus on her index finger from turning book pages rough against the scar on his knuckle. She’d thought about him too, she said, had wondered for years if he was still out on the trails, still picking huckleberries for people who didn’t deserve them. The sun was dipping below the trees now, painting the sky pink and orange, and the air smelled like pine and river mud.
When she leans in to kiss him, the faint tang of lime on her lips tastes better than any wild huckleberry he’s ever picked.
