He’s leaning against the wooden support pole of the bar tent, half-listening to Javi ramble about his granddaughter’s soccer game, when someone slams into his left side hard enough to slosh beer over his hand. He’s about to snap a sharp remark when he looks down and recognizes her: Mara Carter, 46, the woman who’s been plastering the town with flyers for old-growth tree protection, the same woman he’s spent three months making fun of to his poker crew, calling her a tree-hugger who doesn’t know the first thing about forest management. She’s wearing a faded canvas work jacket covered in iron-on patches, work boots caked in mud, her brown hair pulled back in a messy braid stuck through with a pine needle. She doesn’t apologize right away, her eyes lock on the scar on his forearm first, and she reaches out like she’s going to touch it before she pulls back, her cheeks pink.
“Eagle Creek?” she says, and he blinks, no one’s ever identified the scar that fast without him telling them. She nods at his confused expression, says her older brother was on a crew out of Hood River that summer, came home with a scar that matched halfway up his bicep. The distant cover band starts playing Mary Jane’s Last Dance, the smell of fried Oreos and cut grass drifts over from the food stalls, and he finds himself setting his beer down instead of arguing with her like he planned. He teases her first, says he’s seen her flyers all over town, that the ordinance she’s pushing would’ve made it impossible for his crew to do controlled burns a decade back, would’ve left half the town’s homes at risk for wildfire.
She doesn’t get defensive, like he expects. She leans against the pole next to him, close enough that her shoulder brushes his when she shifts, and says she knows. She says she’s been trying to amend the ordinance for six weeks, adding explicit exemptions for Forest Service controlled burn plans and private property fuel reduction, but half the town council writes her off as an out-of-state activist who moved here three years ago and doesn’t know local history, the other half is in the pocket of the logging company that wants to clear cut the old growth west of town. She reaches across him to grab a napkin off the bar table behind his back, her arm brushing his chest, and he can smell cedar shampoo and faint cherry lip balm, a scent he hasn’t registered since Lynn stopped wearing makeup during chemo.
They talk for an hour, Javi slipping away at some point with a wink Clay pretends not to see. She sits on the edge of the picnic table across from him, her knees almost touching his thighs when she leans forward to make a point, her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners when she laughs at his story about yelling at the self-checkout machine last week. When she reaches for the peanut butter pretzel he set down on the table between them, her fingers brush his, and he feels a sharp, warm jolt up his arm, the kind of static he thought he’d never feel again. He’d spent months thinking the only thing he felt for her was annoyed disgust, but now that she’s sitting right in front of him, calling him out on his shit but listening when he talks about the fires he fought, that disgust is melting into something softer, something he’s been scared to touch for three years.
The sun dips below the treeline as the fair winds down, string lights strung between the storefronts glowing gold, the crowd thinning out as people head home with their kids and their cotton candy. She pulls her phone out of her jacket pocket, taps the screen a few times, and says the next town council meeting is next Tuesday, asks if he’d come with her to speak about the controlled burn exemptions. Says no one on the council will argue with a guy who spent 32 years fighting fires, who lost his own home in the 2020 Beachie Creek Fire. He hesitates, remembers telling his poker crew earlier that week he’d rather sleep in a poison ivy patch than step foot in one of her “hippie town hall meetings”, but he looks at her, her hand resting an inch from his on the table, and says yes.
They walk to his beat-up 2008 Ford F150 parked two blocks over, the air cool enough that he can see his breath when he laughs at her story about chaining herself to a 400-year-old Douglas fir last month. She stops at the passenger side of the truck, leans up, and presses a soft, quick kiss to his cheek, her lips warm against his stubble. She says she’ll text him the meeting address first thing Monday, pulls open the passenger door, and slides in, since he offered to drive her home, her apartment only three blocks from his. He gets in the driver’s seat, turns the key, the radio flickers on to a Tom Petty deep cut, and he glances over at her, her braid falling over her shoulder as she looks out the window at the passing streetlights. He reaches down, turns the heater up a little, so she doesn’t get cold.
