Merv Pritchard, 62, retired U.S. Forest Service fire spotter, had not spoken to a single member of his ex-wife Linda’s family in 18 years, not even when her brother waved at him in the hardware store parking lot two winters back. He’d spent 37 years perched in 100-foot steel towers scattered across eastern Oregon, tracking smoke plumes through binoculars and talking to no one but the occasional raven that landed on his catwalk, and the habit of keeping people at arm’s length had stuck hard after the divorce. His one consistent indulgence was Tuesday night pool at the Greenwood Tavern, a scuffed cinder block dive on the edge of Bend that smelled like fried cheese curds, stale draft, and the faint, sweet tang of pine sap tracked in on loggers’ work boots.
The first time he saw Jolene, she was wiping down the bar with a frayed rag, Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” warbling low from the jukebox in the corner. She wasn’t the regular bartender, that much he noticed right away: her dark gray hair was pulled back in a messy braid, there was a pine tree tattoo peeking out from the cuff of her flannel shirt, and her nails were chipped with deep cherry polish, calloused at the edges like she spent her free time turning wrenches. She slid his usual IPA across the bar without him asking, and their fingers brushed when he reached for it, the contact warm, unplanned, lingering half a beat longer than it needed to. “Heard you order the same thing every Tuesday,” she said, grinning, and her smile had a gap between her two front teeth that made something tight in his chest loosen before he could stop it.
He shot three games of pool alone after that, his eyes drifting back to the bar every time he lined up a shot. She moved easy, laughing loud at a regular’s dumb hunting story, wiping beer foam off a guy’s flannel sleeve without even thinking about it, and when she caught him staring she didn’t look away, just raised her beer glass in a tiny toast. He was halfway through his second drink when he heard her mention Linda’s name to the bartender training her, offhand, saying she’d moved back to Bend from Phoenix to help her cousin out with her new catering business after her own husband died of a heart attack six months prior.
The beer tasted sour in his mouth all of a sudden. He’d spent almost two decades blaming Linda’s family for taking her side in the divorce, for telling her she deserved better than a guy who spent 10 months a year living in a fire tower with no cell service, for turning every family holiday into a fight until he finally walked out. He should have grabbed his jacket and left right then, should have written the whole night off as a fluke, should have kept his grudge solid as the granite boulders lining the Deschutes River. But when she walked over to his table to ask if he wanted another round, her hip brushing the edge of his chair so close he could smell the lavender of her soap under the bar grease, he couldn’t make himself say no.
They talked for an hour after that, the bar emptying out around them. He told her about the time he watched a meteor shower from the top of the Mt. Bachelor fire tower, how the sky lit up so bright he thought a wildfire had broken out across the whole valley. She told him she restored 1970s Ford pickup trucks in her garage, that her 9-year-old granddaughter was the state’s top youth gymnast in her age group, that she’d always thought Linda was an idiot for letting a guy who knew how to spot a smoke plume from 30 miles away get away. He reached for the bowl of peanuts on the table at the same time she did, their hands pressing together on the wood for two full seconds, and he didn’t pull away. She didn’t either.
He was slinging his jacket over his shoulder at 9:45, planning to slip out before he did something stupid, when she pressed a crumpled paper bag into his hand, still warm, full of leftover cheese curds from the fryer. “Heard you live out in the woods off Skyliners Road,” she said, leaning against the bar, her shoulder inches from his, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “Figured you get tired of eating canned beans every night.” He almost told her he didn’t take handouts from Linda’s family, almost let the old bitterness win, but then he noticed the smudge of fryer grease on her left cheek, the same smudge his mom used to get when she fixed his dirt bike after school when he was 12. He took the bag, his fingers brushing hers again, and asked her if she wanted to drive out to the river with him after her shift ended to look for fireflies. She said yes before he finished the sentence.
They sat on a fallen ponderosa pine log half an hour later, the air cool off the river, the sound of frogs croaking from the reeds, no streetlights for miles. She leaned her head on his shoulder after 10 minutes, the weight of it soft, familiar, and he didn’t flinch, didn’t think about the 18 years of grudges he’d carried, didn’t think about Linda or the divorce or all the nights he’d sat alone in his cabin telling himself he was better off by himself. He pulled a cold lemon seltzer out of his truck cooler and handed it to her, his thumb brushing the back of her hand when she took it. A firefly landed on the knee of her jeans, glowing bright gold for three slow beats before it fluttered off into the dark.
