Moe Yazzie, 53, spends 40 hours a week hefting split oak and lodgepole into the bed of his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150, running his small firewood delivery service out of a tin shed outside Palisade, Colorado. He’s got a limp that pulls his left hip a half-inch lower than his right, a holdover from a 2017 blaze that chewed through 12,000 acres of pinyon-juniper west of Grand Junction, and a scar slashing through the stubble on his left cheek that makes strangers think twice about striking up small talk. He’s avoided anything resembling a social obligation since his wife left him eight years prior, calls that his “no unnecessary drama” rule, and his only regular plans are coffee at the I-70 diner every Tuesday and Thursday at 7 a.m.
He’s stirring his third black coffee of the morning in late October, when the aspen up on the mesa are burning gold, when someone slides into the vinyl booth across from him uninvited. He looks up, ready to tell the interloper to beat it, and freezes. It’s Lila, his ex-wife’s niece, the last person he expected to see within 100 miles of his town. He hasn’t spoken to her since the divorce, when she was 20 and driving cross country to college, stopped by their house for a night and told him she thought his ex was making a mistake. Now she’s 38, sun-streaked brown hair pulled back in a braid, a rock climbing chalk bag hooked to the belt loop of her worn jeans, and she’s grinning like she knows she’s breaking his unspoken rule.
She orders a stack of pancakes with extra blueberry syrup, and he doesn’t tell her to leave. They make awkward small talk first, she says she’s a traveling physical therapist, just took a three-month contract at the local hospital, rented a tiny cottage at the base of the mesa. She asks about his hip, mentions she remembers him limping around the family Fourth of July cookout the year before the divorce. He tenses, ready to shut the conversation down, when her knee brushes his under the table, warm and solid, and he loses his train of thought. She holds his eye contact longer than she should, no trace of awkwardness, and says she’s got a dry needling certification that works wonders for old fire-related muscle damage. He says no, fast, too fast, because the line is clear: she’s his ex’s family, messing around with her is the kind of drama he spent eight years running from.
He runs into her again three days later at the town’s fall festival, where he’s dropping off a half-cord of firewood he donated for the raffle. She’s manning the local animal shelter booth, covered in golden retriever puppy hair, holding a squirming black lab mix in one arm. When he hands her the raffle ticket stubs, their fingers brush, her palm is calloused and warm, and he feels a jolt go up his arm that has nothing to do with his old nerve damage. She teases him about turning down her PT offer, says his limp is getting worse, she saw him hobbling across the fairground parking lot. He laughs, he hasn’t laughed that easy in years, and when she asks him again to come by her cottage after the festival, he says yes before he can talk himself out of it.
Her cottage smells like pine and cinnamon when he walks in, soft jazz playing low on a record player in the corner. She has him lay on her couch, rolls up the hem of his flannel shirt to expose his hip, and presses her thumb into the tight knot just above his pelvis. He hisses, the pain sharp and bright for half a second before it melts into something warm, something loose. She leans in closer, her breath fanning across his neck, and says she always had a crush on him when she was a kid, thought he was the toughest, kindest guy she’d ever met, used to make up excuses to talk to him at family gatherings. He tenses, waiting for the disgust he’s supposed to feel, the guilt, the urge to run, but it doesn’t come. All he feels is the weight of her hand on his hip, the sound of her voice, the quiet hum of the record player, and he realizes he’s been starving for this, for someone who sees him, not just the grumpy firewood guy with the scar and the limp.
He tilts his head back, and she doesn’t hesitate, her lips brushing his jaw first, soft, then his mouth, tasting like the apple cider she was drinking at the festival. He pulls her closer, his hand fisting in the back of her flannel, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t think about the rules, about the drama, about what his ex would say.
They spend the rest of the night on her back porch, drinking spiked spiced cider, watching the gold aspen leaves blow across the yard, the mesa glowing pink in the sunset. He texts his buddy to cover his next day’s firewood runs, and when she laces her fingers through his, his hip doesn’t ache, not even a little.
