Rafe Jimenez, 53, retired U.S. Forest Service smokejumper, stood slouched against the folding table holding his dutch oven of elk chili, picking at a frayed edge of his Carhartt jacket. He’d argued for 20 minutes with his next door neighbor the night before, telling her he had zero interest in dragging his cookware to the Bend fall community cookoff, but she’d showed up on his porch with a six pack of his favorite IPA and a sob story about her kid having a soccer tournament, so he’d caved. The air smelled like roasted chiles, burnt hot dog buns, and the faint pine tang blowing off the Cascades, the crowd hummed with the kind of small town chatter he’d spent most of his adult life avoiding. He’d already decided he’d leave as soon as the judges handed out the third place ribbon he knew he’d get; the guy who ran the BBQ joint on the east side always took first, and the elementary school PTA mom took second every year with her weirdly sweet turkey chili.
He was halfway through crumpling a used paper plate when Lila Marlow stepped up to his table. He recognized her immediately—she was the new librarian who’d moved to town six months prior, the one everyone kept saying was “too sweet to handle this town’s garbage,” and the one he’d been quietly mad at for three weeks after he heard she’d banned his favorite old hunting memoir from the library’s adult section. She was wearing a faded green flannel rolled up to her elbows, jeans cuffed over scuffed work boots, and her dark hair was pulled back in a messy braid stuck through with a few stray maple leaves. She leaned in, elbows on the edge of his table, and her shoulder brushed his bicep when a group of kids darted past, chasing a golden retriever.
“Smells better than anything else here,” she said, nodding at his dutch oven, and held out a paper sample cup. Her voice was lower than he expected, rough around the edges like she smoked a pack a day, and when she looked up at him her hazel eyes held his longer than polite, no shifty glance away like most people did when they talked to the gruff ex-smokejumper who lived alone in the woods off Cascade Lakes Highway.
Rafe grunted, ladled a scoop of chili into her cup, and didn’t bother hiding the edge in his voice when he said, “Figured you’d be over at the PTA table, banning more books instead of eating chili made by a guy who owns three guns and kills his own meat.”
She didn’t flinch. She took a bite of the chili, hummed, and wiped a smudge of sauce off her chin with the back of her hand. “I fought that ban for three months, for the record. Town council voted 5-2 to pull it, said it ‘promoted irresponsible hunting.’ I kept my personal copy, though. The one with the annotations from the old smokejumper who donated it to the library back in 98.”
Rafe’s throat went dry. That was his old copy, the one he’d donated when he was 28, fresh off his first fire season. He’d written all over the margins, notes about jumping into the same fire zones the author wrote about, dumb jokes he’d scrawled when he was bored between jumps. He stared at her, and for the first time he noticed the tiny pine tree tattoo on her wrist, the faint freckles across her nose, the way her thumb rubbed the edge of the sample cup like she was nervous he’d snap at her again.
He apologized, quiet, and passed her a chunk of cornbread he’d baked that morning. Their fingers brushed when she took it, and he felt a jolt shoot up his arm, the kind he hadn’t felt since he was 19 and his high school girlfriend had kissed him after his first football game. She didn’t pull her hand away right away, just held his gaze for another beat, and smiled, a little lopsided, like she knew exactly what he was feeling.
They talked for 40 minutes, standing so close their shoulders kept brushing every time someone walked past. He told her about the knee injury that forced him to retire, the time he jumped into a fire outside Sisters and spent three days stuck in a root cellar waiting for backup, the way he spent every fall hunting elk in the Ochocos. She told him about growing up in eastern Oregon, how she’d moved to Bend after her mom died, how she snuck the banned memoir out to kids who asked for it, hiding it in the back of the poetry section where the council never looked. The noise of the cookoff faded into background hum, and all he could smell was lavender hand cream mixed with the smoke from his chili, all he could feel was the warmth of her arm pressed against his, the way she laughed at his dumb jokes about fire crew pranks like she actually thought they were funny.
When the judges called his name for third place, he didn’t even bother walking over to get the ribbon. She leaned in, so close he could feel her breath on his cheek, and said, “You wanna bring that dutch oven back to my place? I got that memoir, and a bottle of bourbon I’ve been saving for someone who actually gets those hunting stories. No pressure, if you don’t.”
Rafe hesitated for half a second. He hadn’t invited anyone back to his place, or gone to anyone else’s, since his wife left him for his former fire crew partner 8 years prior. He’d gotten used to being alone, used to not having to explain his rough edges, his quiet days, the way he still slept with a radio tuned to the fire service frequency just in case. But he looked at her, at the way she was biting her lower lip like she was scared he’d say no, and he nodded.
He grabbed the dutch oven with one hand, and when she slipped her other hand into his as they walked down the sidewalk, crinkly golden maple leaves crunching under their boots, he laced his fingers through hers and didn’t let go.
