Manny Ruiz, 57, has spent the last 12 years as a wildfire mitigation specialist, driving the winding backroads of Shasta County to clear brush from property lines and drill homeowners on evacuation plans. His least favorite part of the job, by a mile, is mandatory community events. He only showed up to the brewery fundraiser for last summer’s fire victims because his former Cal Fire crew threatened to leave caked-on fire retardant stains all over the hood of his beat-up 2008 Tacoma if he bailed.
He’s leaning against the chipped brick wall next to the tap line, nursing a hazy IPA that tastes like citrus dish soap, when it happens. She reaches for a black cherry seltzer at the exact same second he reaches for a water to cut the bitter beer taste, their knuckles brushing hard enough to make her half-empty glass of pinot grigio slosh over the edge onto the cuff of his frayed fire-resistant flannel. She laughs, loud and warm, not the awkward polite chuckle he’s used to from strangers who see the calluses on his hands and the scar slicing through his left eyebrow and assume he’s unapproachable. “Sorry about that,” she says, dabbing at the wet spot on his sleeve with a crumpled napkin. Her hand stays on his forearm for two beats longer than necessary, and he can smell lavender shampoo mixed with the hickory smoke drifting from the BBQ food truck parked out front.
He recognizes her halfway through her apology. Clara Marlow, younger sister of his old fire crew captain, Joe, who retired two years ago to move to a ranch outside Bozeman. He’s seen her face in dozens of framed photos on Joe’s kitchen counter over the years, but she’s taller in person, her dark hair streaked with gray pulled back in a loose braid, a smudge of blue ink on the side of her thumb from the graphic design work she does out of Portland. He’s always been the type to shut down casual conversation with anyone he doesn’t work with, still skittish eight years out from his wife leaving him for a realtor who didn’t spend 12 hours a day covered in pine needles and fire retardant dust. He opens his mouth to mumble a generic it’s fine and walk away, but she’s already asking him how the mitigation routes for the western side of the county are coming, says she’s in town for three weeks to design new, easier-to-read evacuation signs for the county’s public works department.
She leans against the wall next to him, close enough that their shoulders brush every time someone squeezes past to get to the bar. She teases him about the fact he’s still wearing the same scuffed steel-toe work boots he wore on a crew trip to Yosemite in 2016, and he finds himself teasing back, pointing out the chipped mint-green nail polish on her toes peeking out of her leather sandals, says she’ll never survive the rutted backcountry roads if she doesn’t invest in a pair of work boots of her own. He’s half horrified at how easy it is, how he doesn’t have to overthink every word, how he doesn’t feel the usual urge to check his phone every two minutes to fish for an excuse to leave. For a second he’s disgusted with himself, that he’s even entertaining the idea of something more than small talk, that he’s risking the quiet, predictable life he’s built for himself where the only risks he takes are calculated, measured, no chance of unexpected heartbreak. But when she tilts her head back to laugh at a joke he makes about the county’s former public works director who thought neon orange stop signs were a good idea, he feels the tension leave his shoulders before he can stop it.
By 10 p.m. most of the crowd has filtered out, the only people left are his old crew playing darts in the back corner and a group of community college students playing pool near the door. They wander outside to sit on the curb, the cool October air stinging his cheeks after the stuffy heat of the brewery. She leans in to pluck a dry pine needle stuck to the collar of his flannel, her fingers grazing the side of his neck for a split second, and he doesn’t flinch. He’s spent his whole career calculating risk, weighing the odds of a stray spark turning into a blaze, of a dry brush patch turning into a 50-foot wall of fire in 10 minutes. For the first time in almost a decade, he doesn’t run from the risk that’s sitting right in front of him. He asks her if she wants to get breakfast at the diner off I-5 the next morning, the one with the famous huckleberry pancakes she’d mentioned Joe used to take her to when she was a kid visiting for summer.
She says yes, pulling a ballpoint pen out of her jacket pocket and scribbling her cell number on the back of the crumpled fire safety flyer he has stuffed in his jeans pocket. He tucks the paper into the worn leather of his wallet, right next to the photo of his old Cal Fire crew he’s carried around since the 2018 Camp Fire. He taps the scuffed leather of his wallet twice, already mentally rearranging his property inspection schedule for the next weekend so he can pick her up at the Redding bus station when she comes back to look at rental apartments.
