Rafe Mendez, 58, retired smokejumper turned wildfire mitigation consultant, avoided the annual Gallatin County fire department fundraiser for six straight years. He only showed up this time because his 16-year-old niece begged him to buy raffle tickets for the new ATV she was gunning to win. A scar slashes diagonally across his left eyebrow, leftover from a 2012 burn outside Missoula, and he wears a faded charcoal Carhartt shirt still crusted with pine sap on the cuff, work boots caked in mud from a job site he’d left an hour prior. He nurses a cold IPA out of a dented plastic cup, leans against a split-rail fence, half bored, half scanning the crowd for an excuse to cut out early and head home to his hound dog Mabel.
He spots her a minute later, weaving through the cluster of picnic tables with a stack of paper plates balanced in one hand. Clara Hale, 52, the new county librarian, ex-wife of his old smokejumper crew lead Jake Hale. Rafe hasn’t spoken to Jake in 10 years, not after Jake bailed on a high-risk jump that left two rookies stranded in a burn zone for 12 hours, then lied to command to pin the mistake on Rafe. He’s gone out of his way to avoid Clara since she moved to town last year, figured she’d take Jake’s side, that talking to her would violate the unspoken crew code he’d lived by for three decades. He turns to slip toward the parking lot, but she calls his name before he can get three steps away.
She crosses the patch of dry, scratchy grass in scuffed leather boots, auburn hair streaked with silver pulled back in a loose braid, a smudge of barbecue sauce on the side of her wrist. She stops so close he can smell lavender hand cream and the faint tang of lemon polish she uses on the library’s oak checkout desk, the hem of her frayed denim skirt brushing the toe of his work boot. “I was hoping you’d show up,” she says, holding out a plate stacked high with pulled pork and vinegar coleslaw. Her fingers brush his for half a second when he takes the plate, warm and calloused from turning pages and stacking hardcovers, and he freezes, unused to intentional, casual touch from anyone who isn’t Mabel.
He mumbles a thanks and sits on a nearby hay bale, fully expecting her to move on. Instead she sits right next to him, their shoulders pressed together through the thin fabric of their shirts, heat from her arm seeping through to his skin. He’s torn between inching away and leaning in, old loyalty to a crew that abandoned him warring with the sharp, quiet spark he’s felt every time he’s passed her in the grocery store, every time she smiled at him when he dropped off boxes of old fire safety books at the library. He tells himself he’s being stupid, that she’s just being polite, that getting involved with anyone, let alone Jake’s ex, is a mistake he can’t afford to make at his age, not after his ex-wife left him seven years prior with nothing but a note and a half-empty bottle of bourbon.
They make small talk at first, about the fire chief’s notoriously terrible grilling skills, about the stack of vintage western novels she just ordered for the library’s used book sale, about Mabel, who chewed up three of her library books the month prior. She laughs at his joke about Mabel having terrible taste in pulp fiction, head tilted back, crinkles fanning at the corners of her hazel eyes, and he finds himself leaning in closer, not even pretending to pay attention to the country cover band playing off to the side. She holds eye contact with him for three full seconds longer than is strictly polite, and he feels his face heat up, a silly flutter he hasn’t experienced since he was 17 asking a girl to his senior prom.
She leans in even closer, her mouth almost touching his ear so he can hear her over the twang of the guitar, and says she knows all about the fight with Jake. That Jake admitted he was the one who messed up the deployment years ago, that she left him three years prior because he never took responsibility for any of his mistakes, at work or at home. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for months,” she says, her hand resting light and steady on his knee for a beat, “I just didn’t want to push.” The old, heavy guilt in his chest melts away fast, replaced by a warm, giddy thrill he’d thought he’d lost forever after his ex-wife left. He doesn’t feel like he’s breaking some stupid, outdated rule anymore, just feels like he’s exactly where he’s supposed to be.
He asks her if she wants to get pancakes and coffee at the little diner on Main Street the next morning, no rush, no plans, just talk. She grins, pulls a ballpoint pen out of her jacket pocket, scribbles her phone number on the back of a raffle ticket, and tucks it into the breast pocket of his Carhartt, her fingers brushing the faint scar on his chest through the fabric. She stands up to leave, pauses, and presses a quick, soft kiss to his scarred eyebrow before walking away to help the teen volunteers selling raffle tickets. He sits there for ten more minutes, sipping his now-warm beer, the paper of the raffle ticket crinkling under his fingers when he presses his hand to his pocket, watching her laugh as she buys three tickets for the ATV.
