Clay Hollister, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighter turned custom woodturner, had avoided the Saturday farmers market for three straight years before that July afternoon. He’d gotten sick of the pitying smiles from neighbors who still asked how he was holding up, seven years out from his wife Elaine’s breast cancer diagnosis and six years, eleven months, three weeks out from her funeral. His biggest flaw, if you asked the few friends he still had, was that he’d frozen every part of his life that didn’t involve sanding cedar blanks or fixing fence lines on his 12-acre property outside Missoula, convinced any joy that didn’t tie back to Elaine’s memory was a betrayal. He’d worn the same frayed Carhartt jacket, even in 80-degree heat, for four years, the left cuff frayed where Elaine had sewn a patch of a pine tree on it before their 20th anniversary camping trip.
The air that day smelled like roasted sweet corn, cut alfalfa, and the sharp, sweet tang of lavender from the booths lining the sidewalk. He’d only come to drop off a custom turned maple mortar and pestle he’d made for a local jam maker, had planned to be in and out in 10 minutes, when his boot caught on a loose cinder block at the edge of a booth stacked with glass jars of dried herbs, knocking a full jar of calendula petals off the edge. He reached down to grab it the same time the vendor did, their foreheads knocking hard enough to make them both grunt, then laugh when he fumbled the jar and petals spilled across the weathered wood of the booth counter.
It was Mara, Elaine’s younger cousin, the one he’d only seen a handful of times, mostly at family holidays back when she was a scruffy 20-something who’d crash their cabin trips with a backpack full of trail mix and a beat-up skateboard. She was 46 now, her dark hair streaked with silver at the temples, a tiny pine tree tattoo peeking out from the cuff of her linen shirt, her calloused hands brushing his as they scooped petals back into the jar. She smelled like pine resin and vanilla, the same perfume Elaine had worn every day for 30 years, and for half a second Clay’s throat tightened so hard he could barely speak, half disgust at the jolt of attraction that shot up his spine, half giddy, foreign excitement he hadn’t felt since he was 20 and had first asked Elaine out at a rodeo.
She didn’t mention Elaine at first, just teased him for still tripping over his own boots, said she’d moved back to town two months prior, had gotten sick of working remote out of a 500 square foot apartment in Portland through three years of pandemic lockdowns and protests, had wanted to be somewhere she could see the mountains every morning, run the apothecary booth and rent the old run-down cabin three miles down the dirt road from his place, the one with the leaky metal roof that the previous owners had never fixed. He offered to patch it for free, said he had extra shingles stacked behind his garage, and she shook her head, said she’d pay him in homemade peach pie and the elderberry syrup she made that was strong enough to knock out even the worst summer cold. He agreed before he could talk himself out of it, told her he’d be out at 6 p.m. two days later, when the sun was low enough he wouldn’t be working in 90-degree heat.
He showed up 10 minutes early, the bed of his beat-up Ford F-150 stacked with shingles and a cordless drill, crickets already chirping in the tall grass lining the driveway. The roof only took an hour and a half to fix, and when he climbed down the ladder, his flannel soaked through with sweat, she was sitting on the front porch steps, a glass of iced sweet tea waiting for him on the rickety wood rail, a slice of peach pie on a paper plate next to it. The steps were only 3 feet wide, so when he sat down, their knees were pressed together from ankle to thigh, the thin fabric of her linen pants warm against the denim of his jeans.
She held eye contact with him longer than was polite when he told her about the 2018 Lolo Peak fire that had left the scar slashing across his left eyebrow, her gaze drifting from the scar to his mouth and back up again when he laughed at the story of him tripping over a fallen log and face-planting in a patch of poison ivy mid-fire fight. When she leaned over to brush a pine needle off the shoulder of his shirt, her hand lingered on his bicep for three full beats, her thumb brushing the edge of the pine tree patch on his jacket cuff, and he didn’t pull away.
She told him she’d had a crush on him since she was 19, when she’d crashed that first camping trip and watched him carry Elaine up the trail after she’d twisted her ankle, but she’d never said anything because he was so obviously, hopelessly in love with her cousin. He told her he’d spent the last seven years convinced he’d never feel anything close to that kind of softness for anyone else, that he’d felt like even looking at another woman would be spitting on Elaine’s memory, but sitting there next to her, he didn’t feel like he was replacing anyone. He felt like he was finally allowed to breathe again, like Elaine would have laughed at him for being so stupid for so long, for closing himself off from something that made him feel alive.
They kissed slow, the peach pie sitting half-eaten between them, the sun dipping below the Bitterroot Mountains and painting the sky pink and orange, the crickets chirping so loud it almost drowned out the sound of the creek running behind the cabin. He stayed for dinner, she grilled zucchini and corn from the market, they listened to old Johnny Cash records that had been her dad’s, talked until the stars came out, about Elaine, about the fire, about the weird, unnameable grief of losing someone you love and still having to keep living.
He left when the moon was high, his flannel shirt slung over his arm, the leftover slice of peach pie wrapped in tin foil tucked in his truck’s cup holder. He cranked his window down on the dirt road drive home, let the cool mountain air hit his face, and for the first time in seven years, he didn’t feel guilty for smiling.
