Javi Mendez, 52, retired U.S. Forest Service hotshot crew lead, had only planned to hit the Bozeman farmers market for 10 minutes flat. He’d spent the morning prying a rusted crankshaft out of a 1998 Ski-Doo, sawdust and motor oil caked deep under his fingernails, and his only goals were a jar of extra-spicy dill pickles from the Amish stand and two pounds of grass-fed ribeye for the grill. He hated crowds, hated the tinny bluegrass leaking from the portable stage at the center of the lot, hated the way kids on scooters weaved between booths like they owned the pavement, but the pickles were worth the hassle.
He cut through the honey aisle to skip a cluster of tourists haggling over overpriced hand-knit wool socks, and his boot caught on a loose wooden slat in the walkway. The iced coffee in his left hand sloshed over the rim, splattering across the chest of a woman standing in front of the wildflower honey jars, her cream linen button-down blooming with dark brown splotches right over the sternum. Javi froze, his face going hot, the kind of embarrassed flush he hadn’t felt since he’d accidentally set his crew chief’s tent on fire during a 2012 blaze outside Salmon, Idaho. He started stammering an apology, already reaching for his wallet to offer to pay for the shirt, when she laughed, a low, warm sound that cut straight through the noise of the market.
She was Lila, Marge the beekeeper’s niece, in town from Portland for three weeks to help her aunt run the booth while she recovered from knee replacement surgery. Javi had seen her a handful of times walking Marge’s golden retriever past his cabin on the edge of town, but he’d never stopped to talk, always ducking back into his garage before she could wave. She wiped at the coffee splotches with a crumpled paper napkin, told him it was fine, she’d spilled an entire glass of malbec on the shirt last month anyway, and it was already due for a trip to the thrift store. He insisted on buying her a replacement drink, a strawberry lemonade from the stand at the end of the aisle, and she agreed, on the condition he split a peach popsicle with her to make up for the scare.
They sat on a splintered pine bench at the edge of the market, and Javi found himself talking more than he had in months. He told her about the time his crew had gotten stuck on a ridge for three days with nothing but trail mix and a single dented can of warm beer, about the way wildfire smoke turns the sunset pink and tangerine for weeks after a big blaze, about the snowmobile he was fixing up to donate to the local youth outdoor program. She leaned in when he talked, her shoulder brushing his every time someone squeezed past the narrow space next to the bench, her eyes locked on his like she actually cared what he had to say. When a kid on a scooter veered too close, she grabbed his forearm to yank him out of the way, her palm warm through the thin fabric of his faded work shirt, and he didn’t flinch, the way he usually did when people touched him unprompted.
He’d spent eight years telling himself he didn’t deserve to have fun, that enjoying anything that didn’t involve work or fixing things around the cabin was a betrayal of his late wife, who’d passed from ovarian cancer six months after they’d closed on the Bozeman property. He’d turned down every invite to barbecues, every blind date set-up from Marge and the other neighbors, convinced he was too rough, too quiet, too stuck in his own head to be good company for anyone. But sitting there next to Lila, the popsicle sticky on his fingers, the smell of grilled street corn and wild honey hanging thick in the summer air, that nagging voice in his head got quieter and quieter. She pointed up at a red-tailed hawk circling overhead, and her knuckles grazed his jaw when she lifted her hand, her skin soft against the three days of stubble he’d forgotten to shave that morning.
She asked him if he wanted to come over to Marge’s house for dinner later, said she’d been watching him work in his garage through the pine trees for two weeks, and she’d been dying to ask him about the fleet of vintage snowmobiles lined up in his driveway. He hesitated for half a second, the old voice yelling that he was going to mess this up, that it was stupid to get attached when she was leaving in ten days, that he should just go home and grill his ribeye alone. Then he looked at her, her sun-streaked hair sticking up a little from the warm wind, a smudge of peach popsicle on her lower lip, and he said yes.
They walked back to his beat-up 2006 Ford F-150 together, and when her hand slipped into his, calloused from pulling weeds for her Portland landscape design business, his calloused from pulling fallen trees and turning wrench handles for decades, he laced his fingers through hers without a second thought.
