Clay Bennett, 58, retired wildland firefighter turned small-scale sawmill owner, leaned his shoulder into the rough pine of the custom picnic table he’d spent three weeks building for the county park’s end-of-fair wrap-up. He’d planned to drop the table off, grab one free beer from the park board, and hightail it back to his cabin before the crowd of out-of-state summer transplants got too loud. A scar sliced diagonally across his left cheek, a memento from the 2018 Lolo Creek blaze that took two of his crew, and he’d spent the last six months openly loathing Mara Hale, the newly elected county commissioner who’d pushed through an ordinance cutting his sawmill’s operating hours by two a day. He’d called her a carpetbagging rule monkey at the last town hall, she’d called him a stubborn mule who refused to read his mail, and they’d avoided each other ever since.
He was halfway through his cold IPA, condensation soaking through the cuff of his grease-stained flannel, when he caught her standing three feet away, closer than the standard Montana polite distance, watching him. She wasn’t wearing the stiff navy pantsuit he’d only ever seen her in at public meetings. She had on faded Wranglers, scuffed work boots, a white cotton t-shirt dotted with sawdust, and a red flannel tied around her waist. Her auburn hair was chopped short, falling in messy waves over her forehead, and sunspots freckled the bridge of her nose. When she smiled, he noticed a tiny gap between her two front teeth he’d never spotted from the town hall podium.
Clay grunted, shifting his weight, his boots scuffing the dust. He’d spent months assuming she was the kind of person who only ate imported cheese and shopped at Whole Foods in Missoula, not someone who hung hand-carved cutting boards in her kitchen. She leaned in when a group of teens screamed past, chasing a cotton candy vendor, and her shoulder brushed the bare skin of his bicep where his flannel sleeve was rolled up. The contact was brief, but it sent a jolt up his spine he hadn’t felt in 12 years, not since his ex-wife left him for Portland after he refused to talk about the fire.
He wanted to stay mad, wanted to snarl about the ordinance that had cut his weekly production by 20%, but he found himself leaning in too, when she yelled over the band that the noise rule had been a compromise. The out-of-state transplants who’d bought the house adjacent to his mill had threatened a lawsuit that would have shut him down entirely, she said, so she’d negotiated the two-hour cut in exchange for the county covering the full cost of a sound barrier around his mill, one that would let him add four extra Saturday hours once it was installed. She’d had the paperwork in her truck to drop off at his place the next day.
Clay stared at her, stunned, his beer halfway to his mouth. He’d been so busy being furious he hadn’t even checked his PO box for the county letters she said she’d sent three times. When a group of kids playing tag slammed into her back, she stumbled forward, and he caught her around the waist automatically, his calloused hands splayed across the soft curve of her hip. Her hands flew to his chest, and he could feel the fast thud of her heartbeat through her thin t-shirt, their faces six inches apart, the noise of the fair disappearing entirely for a beat. She didn’t pull away immediately, her dark eyes locked on his, and he could feel her breath warm against his jaw.
She stepped back after a second, laughing a little, brushing dust off her jeans, her cheeks pink. She said she owed him a dinner to make up for all the hassle, no fancy suits, no talk of county ordinances, just burgers and the huckleberry pie she swore the diner on Highway 93 made better than anyone else in the state. He agreed before he could talk himself out of it, their fingers brushing when she passed him her phone to type in his number, her nails chipped, a thin scar across her knuckle she said she’d gotten splitting firewood on her homestead last winter. She told him she’d lost her older brother in a logging accident when she was 20, that she got what it was like to carry around guilt for people you couldn’t save, and for the first time in 12 years, Clay didn’t feel the urge to change the subject.
She waved when she walked back to her group of friends, glancing over her shoulder twice, grinning both times. Clay leaned back against the picnic table, sipping his beer, the sound of the band fading back in, the air smelling like fried onion rings and cut pine, the last of the summer sun painting the tops of the fir trees gold. He’d spent 12 years convinced he was too broken, too set in his ways, too old for anything that felt like a thrill, too angry at the world to let anyone in. He tucks his phone back in his work pants pocket, wipes a fleck of sawdust off the edge of his custom picnic table, and decides he’s not in any rush to get home.
