Milo Thorne, 57, retired wildland fire lookout who spent 32 years manning a 70-foot tower in the Sierras, leans against a splintered split-rail fence at the Placerville summer beer festival, half-empty hazy IPA in one hand, calloused other stuffed in the pocket of his faded fire-service flannel. He only came because his old crew chief begged him to show face for the wildfire relief fundraiser, and he’d lost a bet on a Giants game earlier that week, so he couldn’t say no. The sun dips low over the pine-fringed hills, painting the sky burnt orange, and he’s mentally calculating how fast he can slip out before his ex-wife spots him across the lot, where she’s selling peach pies out of a folding table.
A shadow falls over his beer, and he looks up. It’s Lena Voss. He knows who she is. Her husband, a hotshot firefighter 10 years younger than her, died on a blaze outside Tahoe six months prior. The whole town has tiptoed around her like she’s made of glass ever since, no one daring to even ask her how she’s doing for fear of setting off a breakdown. She’s wearing cutoff denim shorts, scuffed white sneakers, and a threadbare John Prine tee, pine tree tattoo wrapping around her left bicep, sun streaking her brown hair with gold. She’s carrying two IPAs, and when she sets one down on the fence rail next to his, their elbows brush. Her skin is warm, even through the thin fabric of his flannel, and he catches a whiff of lavender hand salve and campfire smoke.
“Thought you could use a refill,” she says, nodding at his emptying cup. She’s leaning against the fence a foot away, close enough that he can see the smattering of freckles across her nose, the faint scar above her left eyebrow from a skiing accident she told the local paper about a few years back. He tenses. He knows if anyone sees them talking, the town gossip mill will spit out rumors by sunrise. Part of him recoils at the thought of the drama, of his ex getting wind of it and running her mouth to every person at the diner, of people saying he’s preying on a grieving widow. The other part of him hasn’t had anyone this close to him, anyone who’s looking at him like he’s a person and not the hermit who lives up the mountain, in longer than he can remember.
She tells him she found her husband’s old lookout tower radio in the back of their garage last week, can’t get it to turn on, heard he fixes vintage communications gear as a side gig. She pulls her phone out of her back pocket to show him a photo, and when she holds it out, her hand brushes his. Her fingers are calloused too, he notices, from chopping wood, from working on her old pickup. He explains the likely problem is a corroded tuner, easy fix if you have the right parts, and she laughs when he jokes that the old tower radios had better reception than half the cell phones in town still do. She leans in a little closer when he tells a story about a bear climbing his tower one night, looking for a granola bar he’d left out, and her shoulder presses against his bicep. She doesn’t pull away. He meets her eyes, hazel flecked with gold, and she doesn’t look away either.
The song ends, and she pulls back, still holding his hand, her cheeks pink from the heat and the beer. “I live 10 minutes up the road from your cabin,” she says, her voice low enough that no one around them can hear. “The radio’s on my kitchen table. You can come take a look at it tonight, if you want. No pressure.” He nods, before he can overthink it. They walk toward his beat-up 2008 Tacoma parked at the edge of the lot, her fingers laced through his, the summer air thick with the smell of pine and fried oreos, crickets chirping in the oak trees lining the dirt road. He opens the passenger door for her, and she pauses before climbing in, running her thumb over the thin, faded scar on his knuckle he got fighting a blaze outside Yosemite in 2011.
