Ronan Hale, 62, spent 31 years manning remote fire lookouts across the Pacific Northwest before retiring to a crumbly 1920s cabin outside Missoula eight years prior, after his wife’s three-year battle with breast cancer ended. His biggest flaw? He’d rather spend three days retying a vintage bamboo fly rod’s guide wraps than make 10 minutes of small talk with a neighbor, and he’d avoided every local community event since he moved, until that July afternoon when 12-year-old Jax from two houses down showed up on his porch selling tickets to the fire department’s annual barbecue fundraiser. He’d caved, mostly because Jax’s dad had helped him haul a new water heater up his cabin’s rickety stairs the previous winter, and he hated owing favors.
He’d tucked himself against the back of the beer tent 20 minutes after arriving, lukewarm draft in one hand, a half-eaten bratwurst slathered in sauerkraut in the other, watching the town’s residents mill about, when he reached for a cold canned IPA at the exact same time as the woman next to him. Their knuckles brushed, cold condensation from the can streaking the inside of his wrist, and he felt the rough, clay-stained callus on the side of her index finger before he even looked over. He knew who she was: Lila Marlow, 58, owner of the small pottery studio on Main Street, fresh off a very public, very messy divorce from Gary Marlow, the town’s short-tempered fire chief. Everyone in town had an unspoken rule: don’t so much as make eye contact with Lila unless you wanted Gary breathing down your neck for a month, or worse, showing up to your house with a bogus “fire safety inspection” notice.
He pulled his hand back fast, like he’d touched a hot stove, and mumbled an apology. She laughed, a low, smoky sound that cut through the hum of portable country speakers and screaming kids chasing each other with water guns. “No harm done. I won’t tell if you won’t.” She grabbed the beer, popped the top on the tent’s built-in bottle opener, and leaned against the pole next to him, close enough that he could smell the mix of lavender soap and campfire smoke on her oversized linen shirt, could see the smattering of sun freckles across her nose that didn’t show up when she was behind the counter at her studio, strands of silver threading through her chestnut ponytail.
He didn’t move away, even when a group of volunteer firefighters walked past and gave him pointed, wide-eyed looks, even when he felt that familiar twist of guilt in his gut, the one that had popped up every time he’d even glanced at a woman who wasn’t his wife for the last decade. He told himself he was just being polite, that he’d leave in five minutes, but then she said she’d seen his fly rod display at the county fair the month before, that she’d been trying to teach herself to cast on the river behind her studio and kept getting her line tangled in the overgrown willow trees, and the words were out of his mouth before he could think: “I could show you. If you want. No charge.”
Her eyes lit up, a faint pink flush rising across her cheekbones, and she shifted closer, her bare thigh brushing his denim-clad one for half a second, long enough that he felt the heat of her skin through the thin, sun-faded fabric. “You’d do that? Everyone I’ve asked says they don’t have time, or they’re scared Gary will key their truck if he sees them with me.” He snorted, took a long sip of his beer, the bitter hop taste cutting through the lingering sauerkraut tang in his mouth. “Gary can key my truck if he wants. It’s got 270,000 miles on it, half the paint’s already chipped off from gravel roads. I don’t care.”
He’d almost forgotten they were in a crowd until Gary walked over, his fire department shirt unbuttoned at the collar, face red from the 90-degree heat and too many cheap beers, jaw tight enough that Ronan could see the muscle jumping under his skin. “Ronan. Lila. What’re you two talking about over here?” Ronan didn’t flinch. He leaned a fraction closer to Lila, rested his scarred left forearm (from a rookie-era fire axe accident) on the picnic table they’d wandered to a few minutes earlier, so his hand was inches from hers. “Trout spots. Lila wants to learn to fly fish. Got a problem with that?” Gary stared at him for 10 long, quiet seconds, and for a second Ronan thought he’d swing, but then Gary shook his head, muttered something under his breath about “old fools”, and walked back to his group of friends by the grill.
Lila exhaled slow, reached over and wrapped her fingers around his, her clay callus rough against his own calloused hands, worn smooth from years of tying fishing knots and hauling fire equipment up mountain trails. “You didn’t have to do that.” He shrugged, but he didn’t pull his hand away, didn’t even make a joke about not letting small town bullies push people around. “I wanted to.”
They left the barbecue an hour later, drove out to the quiet stretch of the Clark Fork he fished every Saturday, parked his beat up F150 on the grassy bank, and sat on the tailgate passing a bottle of bourbon he’d stashed under the seat back when he thought the barbecue would be unbearable. The sun was dipping below the Bitterroot Mountains, painting the sky streaks of tangerine and lavender, the sound of the river gurgling over smooth glacial rocks mixing with the chirp of crickets in the pine brush. She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he didn’t tense up, didn’t feel that guilt twisting in his gut anymore, just the warmth of her against his side, the sweet burn of bourbon in his throat, the quiet, thrumming thrill of doing something everyone told him he shouldn’t. He reached for her hand, laced their fingers together, and held on tight as the first fireflies blinked to life above the river.
