Moe Yazzie, 52, spent 22 years leading a U.S. Forest Service wildfire crew out of Flagstaff before a blown knee and a crewmate’s fatal 2019 fall pushed him into early retirement. Now he runs a small firewood delivery and custom fire pit business, works 20 hours a week max, and has spent the last seven years avoiding anything that feels like romantic connection—his biggest flaw, per his 24-year-old daughter, who says he’s wasting the best years of his life moping over a wife who’d tell him to get off the couch and live a little. He’d rolled his eyes when she strong-armed him into donating a hand-welded steel fire pit as a raffle prize for the county fire department’s annual chili cookoff, but he showed up anyway, boots caked with red Coconino County dirt, a half-empty can of chew in his front pocket, lingering by the green chili station long after he’d finished his third bowl.
He was wiping chili grease off his flannel sleeve when Clara Bennett walked up. She was the new county extension agent, 48, moved to town six months prior, and had left seven voicemails asking him to lead a free homeowner workshop on wildfire mitigation for the west side subdivisions. He’d ignored every single one, figured she was just another pencil-pushing bureaucrat who didn’t know the difference between a controlled burn and a forest fire. She stopped half a foot away, close enough that he could smell lavender shampoo mixed with the smoked red chili she was holding in a paper bowl, and her elbow brushed his bicep when she set her bowl down on the picnic table next to his. “Y’know, I was starting to think you lived in the woods off grid with no cell service,” she said, grinning, and he couldn’t help but snort. He’d expected a lecture. He didn’t get one.
For the next hour, they leaned against that wobbly pine picnic table, swapping stories while the cookoff crowd milled around them, country music blaring from the speakers strung between two ponderosa pines. She told him she’d moved to Arizona from Iowa after her ex-husband left her for a 28-year-old realtor, that she’d spent the last three months hiking every trail within 30 miles and burning half the meals she tried to cook on her beat-up portable grill. He told her about the 2019 fire, the way the wind had shifted so fast they barely had time to run, the scar along his left jaw where a falling pine branch had nicked him mid-evacuation. When he mentioned his crewmate’s death, her hand rested on his forearm for two full seconds, warm and light, and his skin prickled like he’d touched a live wire. Half of him felt sharp, hot guilt—like talking to a pretty woman this long was a betrayal of his late wife. The other half couldn’t remember the last time anyone had looked at him like they actually cared what he had to say, not just what he could do for them.
When the emcee called the raffle winners, Moe had to climb up on the rickety wooden stage to draw the ticket for his fire pit. He fumbled with the roll of tickets, pulled one out, read the number out loud, and heard Clara whoop from the crowd ten feet away. He laughed, called her name, and she walked up to accept the prize, winking so fast he almost missed it when she took the certificate from his hand. “Guess you have to come install it now,” she said, quiet enough only he could hear. “No more ignoring my calls.”
He showed up at her small ranch-style house the next Saturday at 10 a.m., gravel for the pit base in the bed of his truck, a six pack of root beer tucked in the cooler next to his tools. She answered the door in cutoff jeans and a faded 1998 Pearl Jam tour t-shirt, no makeup, her hair pulled back in a messy braid, and invited him in. They spent three hours putting the pit together, her holding the level while he tamped down the gravel, their hands brushing every time they passed a wrench or a bag of mortar back and forth. He noticed the thin, silvery scar wrapping around her left wrist, and she told him she’d gotten it when she fell off a horse as a 16-year-old, tried to jump a fence she had no business clearing. By the time they lit the first small test fire in the pit, the sun was dipping low over the San Francisco Peaks, painting the sky pink and orange, and the air smelled like pine and burning cedar.
She brought out leftover chili from the cookoff and two glasses of iced sweet tea, and they sat on folding chairs next to the fire, watching the flames curl up toward the darkening sky. He told her he hadn’t so much as flirted with anyone since his wife died, that he’d been convinced it was wrong to move on. She nodded, told him she’d felt the same way after the divorce, like even thinking about dating made her a failure. When a strand of hair fell in her face, he reached over without thinking, brushed it back behind her ear, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her cheek. She didn’t pull away. She leaned into his touch, just a little, and smiled.
They sat there until the fire burned down to glowing embers, the crickets chirping loud in the brush behind the house, talking about the best hiking trails in the county, the time his daughter tried to set up a Tinder profile for him, the way her cat kept knocking over her houseplants. When he stood up to leave, she stepped close, kissed him soft on the corner of his mouth, and told him to come back the next afternoon, she’d learned how to make fry bread tacos from the neighbor down the street and wanted him to test them. He nodded, didn’t say anything, just climbed in his truck, rolled the windows down, and turned up the old Johnny Cash cassette he keeps in the deck. He drove the whole 12 miles back to his place grinning so wide his cheeks hurt, already mentally clearing his delivery schedule for the entire next week.
