Clay Bennett, 58, retired US Forest Service wildfire crew lead, leaned against the sun-warmed brick wall of the downtown hardware store, cold IPA sweating through the paper coaster in his left hand. He’d snuck away from his mom and her church group 10 minutes prior, already sick of smiling through questions about when he’d “settle down” now that he was back in small-town Ohio. He fished a crumpled pack of Camels from the pocket of his frayed plaid flannel, lit one, and blew a stream of smoke toward the blue July sky, ignoring the “NO SMOKING WITHIN 50 FEET OF FAIR GROUNDS” sign 20 feet away. He’d spent 32 years running into burning forests for a living, he wasn’t about to take orders from a mayor he’d written off as an out-of-touch policy nerd the second she’d pushed the smoking ban through city council three months prior.
“You know that’s a $75 fine now, right?”
The voice was warm, a little amused, no bite to it. He turned, and there she was: Lena Hart, 49, the mayor herself, holding a half-eaten funnel cake, powdered sugar dusted on her left thumb and the cuff of her faded denim work shirt. She wasn’t wearing the crisp navy blazer he’d seen her in at the council meeting, where he’d stood up and yelled for 10 minutes about the ban stripping veterans of their right to smoke on the VFW patio. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a loose braid, a few strands stuck to her sun-pink cheeks, and she was wearing scuffed work boots, not the heels he’d assumed she lived in.
He took a long drag, raised an eyebrow. “Thought you were only writing tickets to teenage skateboarders and guys who leave their trash by the park benches.”
She laughed, a low, rough sound, and leaned against the wall next to him, close enough he could smell coconut sunscreen and the vanilla of the funnel cake over the smoke from his cigarette and the distant smell of fried Oreos from the food truck row. The back of her hand brushed his forearm when she shifted, her calloused finger catching on the thick, silvery scar he’d gotten in the 2019 Oregon fire, when a falling branch had knocked him into a smoldering log. He flinched, not from pain, from the shock of someone touching him who wasn’t his mom or his doctor in years.
“Where’d you get that?” She nodded at the scar, not pulling her hand away immediately.
He told her, short on details at first, but when she asked follow up questions, not the usual polite “that must have been scary” garbage, but real questions about crew sizes, fire containment protocols, what the air smelled like during a stand against a crown fire, he relaxed. He found himself telling her about the 6-week deployment where his wife had left him, sending a text while he was 12 miles into the backcountry with no cell service, saying she’d moved to Denver with a real estate agent and didn’t want to wait for him to come home. He’d not told anyone that, not even his older brother, since it happened.
He’d spent the last three months ranting about her to his VFW buddies, calling her a pencil-pusher who didn’t care about regular people, and now he couldn’t stop talking. She told him she’d pushed the smoking ban through because her dad had died of COPD two years prior, 30 years working the line at the local auto plant, smoking a pack a day on his breaks, and she’d watched kids at the city park breathe in secondhand smoke from guys who didn’t care they were sitting next to a toddler’s sandbox. He felt stupid, suddenly, for yelling at her at that meeting, for not even asking why she’d pushed for the rule.
The Ferris wheel bell rang somewhere behind them, a group of kids screamed as they went over the top, and she wiped a smudge of powdered sugar from her chin. “Wanna walk down to the riverfront? Away from the noise.”
He hesitated, that old stubborn voice in his head yelling that this was a bad idea, that getting close to anyone just meant you’d get left again, that he hated her stupid ban, that he was too old for this kind of thing. Then he looked at her, crinkled hazel eyes, smudge of sugar on her cheek, and nodded.
They walked down the paved path lined with oak trees, their shoulders brushing every few steps, neither of them pulling away. They sat on a weathered wooden bench under a willow tree, the river gurgling quiet a few feet away, and their knees touched when she shifted to face him. She admitted she’d seen him at that council meeting, had thought he was cute even when he was red-faced and yelling, had looked up his Forest Service record later, had cried reading the reports of the three kids he’d pulled from a burning campground outside of Boise in 2017.
He leaned in before he could overthink it, kissed her, tasted powdered sugar and the cherry seltzer she’d been sipping, the faint mint of her gum. She kissed him back, her hand cupping the side of his face, her thumb brushing the stubble on his jaw. They kissed for what felt like 10 seconds or 10 minutes, he couldn’t tell, until a group of teens on bikes yelled a teasing wolf whistle as they rode past.
They talked for another hour, about his mom’s tomato garden, about her plan to put new playground equipment in the low-income neighborhood on the west side of town, about the way the fire season out west had gotten so much worse in the last 10 years. When the sun started to dip low, painting the sky pink and orange, he walked her to her beat-up pickup truck parked on the side street. She pulled a crumpled napkin from her jeans pocket, scribbled her cell number on it in blue ballpoint, added a tiny doodle of a pine tree next to the digits, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his flannel.
“No smoking on our first date,” she said, squeezing his hand before she climbed into the truck. “Pick me up at 7 Friday. I know a spot outside city limits, no ban, no council meetings, no church groups asking when you’re settling down.”
He stood on the sidewalk until her truck turned the corner, then pulled the napkin out of his pocket, grinning when he saw the tiny note scrawled under the number: Pie’s on me. He drove back to his small ranch house an hour later, sat on his porch swing, cracked open another beer, and lit a cigarette, no fine to worry about on his own property. He tapped the napkin against his beer bottle, already mentally mapping the backroad diner 12 miles out of town that serves the best peach pie in the county, no smoking bans, no city council meetings, just pie and whatever comes next.
