Rudy Gallegos, 53, spent 22 years on federal wildland fire crews before a blown ACL and a widowmaker pine that almost crushed his skull pushed him into early retirement four years prior. He now runs a one-man shop outside Flagstaff, building custom steel fire pits and delivering seasoned oak firewood to folks across Coconino County. His biggest flaw? He’s spent the last eight years walling himself off from anything that feels like personal risk, ever since his ex-wife Marnie left him for a real estate agent she met at a school board meeting. He still brings her mom peaches every summer, but avoids all other overlap with her side of the family like they carry contagious ash rot.
He’d agreed to drop off the top three prizes for the county annual chili cookoff at the downtown park on a crisp late October Saturday, mostly because the event coordinator owed him a free elk tag for the upcoming season. The air smelled like charred mesquite, cumin, and the sharp, sweet tang of ponderosa pine blown down from the San Francisco Peaks. His work boots crunched over dead oak leaves scattered across the grass, his hands still caked with steel dust from grinding the winners’ names into the fire pit rims the night before. He was wiping the worst of the grime off on the thigh of his faded Carhartt when a solid weight bumped into his left side.
He turned, half ready to snap about watching where they were going, and froze. Lila Marquez, Marnie’s first cousin, was holding a dented paper bowl of chili in one hand, a plastic spoon in the other, a smudge of red chili powder dusted across her left cheek. She’d moved back to the area six months prior, bought a small cabin 20 minutes up Highway 180, and he’d deliberately avoided every place she was rumored to frequent up until that moment. She stepped back just an inch, not far enough to break the warmth of her shoulder against his bicep, and laughed, the sound low and rough, like she smoked a pack a week when she was drinking. “Whoa, easy there, fire guy. You gonna make me drop the only bowl of chili here that doesn’t taste like canned beans and regret?”
Rudy’s throat went dry. He’d harbored a stupid, unspoken crush on Lila since he was 25, the night he’d brought Marnie home for their first family Christmas, and Lila had beaten him at three straight games of pool in the basement, then winked and told him he was too nice for her cousin. He’d shoved that thought down so deep he’d almost forgotten it existed, until that second, when he could smell cedar and vanilla on her clothes, see the faint laugh lines around her dark eyes, the small scar on her jaw from a motorcycle crash when she was 19.
He mumbled an apology, tried to step back, but she hooked a finger through the loop of his Carhartt to hold him in place. “Don’t run off yet. I’ve been asking around about your fire pits. I need one for the back patio at my cabin. How far out are you booked?”
Rudy’s brain short-circuited. He was booked three months out, easy, but he almost said so before she leaned in a little closer, her elbow brushing his forearm, and lowered her voice like she was sharing a secret. “I’ll pay double. And I’ve got a mule deer stand on my property up on the rim that’s never had anybody but me in it. You’ve been talking about tagging a big buck this year, right?”
He knew she was playing him, but he didn’t care. The taboo of it hummed under his skin, half disgust at the thought of what Marnie and her extended family would say if they found out, half hot, sharp desire he hadn’t felt in almost a decade. He agreed to meet her at her cabin at 9 a.m. the next day, left the cookoff as fast as he could, and spent the rest of the night alternating between yelling at himself for being an idiot and replaying the way her hand had felt curled around his jacket loop.
He showed up 10 minutes early the next morning, his tape measure in his pocket, a thermos of black coffee in his hand. The cabin was tucked between a stand of old-growth ponderosa pines, the porch strung with warm white fairy lights, a stack of split oak piled neatly against the side wall. Lila answered the door in worn gray sweatpants and a faded 1998 Pearl Jam tour t-shirt, her hair pulled back in a messy bun, holding a mug of what smelled like spiced apple cider. She didn’t invite him in right away, just leaned against the doorframe, smiled, and said he didn’t have to look so nervous, she wasn’t gonna bite. Unless he asked nicely.
They walked around to the back patio, flagstone cracked in a few spots from the previous winter’s heavy snow, overlooking a valley dotted with aspen trees turning bright gold in the mid-morning sun. They knelt down at the same time to measure the width of the usable patio space, their knees bumping hard, and when Rudy looked up, she was already staring at him, no more teasing, no more sharp one-liners. “I’ve had a thing for you since that Christmas, you know,” she said, quiet enough that the wind rustling through the pine needles almost carried the words away. “Marnie cheated on you six months before she left. You don’t owe her a damn thing. You don’t owe anyone a damn thing.”
The tight knot of guilt that had been sitting in his chest since the cookoff loosened all at once. He reached up, brushed a stray pine needle off her cheek, his thumb lingering on the thin scar along her jaw. She didn’t pull away. She leaned into the touch, her hand coming up to rest on the back of his, warm and calloused from splitting her own firewood, from working on her beat-up 1992 Ford F-150 in her driveway on weekends.
They didn’t measure the patio that day. They sat on her rickety wooden porch swing instead, drank spiced cider and his black coffee, talked about the massive 2019 Wallow Fire he’d spent three weeks fighting, the cross-country road trip she’d taken after she got divorced three years prior, the way the snow piled so high on the rim some winters you couldn’t get down the mountain for three days at a time. When the sun started to dip below the western edge of the plateau, painting the sky streaks of tangerine and pale lavender, he leaned in and kissed her, slow, no rush, no pressure. She kissed him back, her hand tangling in the short graying hair at the nape of his neck, and he didn’t feel even a flicker of guilt.
When she pulled back to catch her breath, she was smiling, and he could taste the cinnamon from her cider on his own lips.
