Manny Ruiz, 53, spent 22 years on a federal wildland hotshot crew before a blown knee and a widow’s pension convinced him to hang up his fire shelter and start a small tree trimming and firewood delivery business outside Missoula, Montana. He’s stubborn to a fault, still refuses to hire extra help even when his left knee swells so bad after a full day of cutting lodgepole pine he can barely climb his front porch steps, and he hasn’t so much as asked a woman out for coffee since his wife Karen died of triple-negative breast cancer six years prior. Most weekends he holed up at the local VFW post, drank cheap grain belt draft, and dominated trivia night, avoiding the regulars’ consistent nudges to run for post commander like they were burning embers flying off a wind-whipped campfire.
It was 92 degrees at the post’s mid-July cookout, the air thick with hickory smoke and the sharp tang of mustard-dusted potato salad left out too long in the sun, when he spotted her hovering by the burger grill, twisting a faded county extension agent lanyard around her wrist. He didn’t recognize her, which was rare for a town this small where everyone knew everyone’s business down to the brand of beer they bought at the grocery store, and he nodded when she stepped closer, wiping sweat off his brow with the back of his unscarred forearm, the other crisscrossed with thick, silvery scar tissue from a 2018 blaze outside Lolo that almost took his whole crew.
“Figured I’d introduce myself before the group of retired loggers over there start buying me shots of peppermint schnapps I definitely don’t want,” she said, leaning against the dented metal grill rail a foot away from him, close enough he could smell the lavender hand lotion she wore under the faint scent of pine sap on her heavy work jeans and the dirt on her steel-toe boots. Her name was Lena Hart, 49, new to the area after transferring from a Forest Service office in Oregon, running the county’s new wildfire mitigation program for rural homeowners, and she’d tracked him down specifically because she’d heard he knew every inch of the surrounding national forest burn scars like the back of his hand.
He was wary at first, defaulting to short, gruff answers, half convinced she was going to ask him to volunteer for some free community workshop he didn’t have time for between hauling firewood orders and trimming dead trees off elderly residents’ properties. But when he mentioned he’d been the crew lead on the team that contained the 2018 Lolo fire, she leaned in a little further, her shoulder brushing his sun-warmed bicep when she reached past him for a jar of dill pickles on the folding table behind him, and her dark brown eyes held his for two full beats longer than casual small talk required, no polite look away, no awkward laugh to defuse the tension.
The conflict hit him square in the chest then, sharp as a pine needle to the palm: he was attracted to her, obvious as the bright red sunburn creeping up the back of his neck, and half of him hated it, felt like he was betraying Karen by even noticing how the corners of her mouth crinkled when she laughed at his dumb joke about the time his crew accidentally set their own portable toilet on fire during a controlled burn. The other half of him ached for the conversation, for the way she didn’t treat him like a broken old man just because he walked with a slight limp, for the fact she asked follow up questions about his old crew instead of just nodding and changing the subject to grandkids or rising medical bills like most people his age did.
He showed her the scar on his forearm an hour later, when they’d wandered away from the crowd to lean against the weathered split rail fence surrounding the post’s potholed parking lot, the sun dipping low enough to paint the Bitterroot Range soft pink and tangerine. He told her the full story of how he’d gotten it, running back into a half-burned neighborhood to pull a panicking family’s horse trailer out of the path of the fire before the propane tank on their porch exploded, and when she reached out to trace the edge of the raised, rough scar tissue with the tip of her index finger, he didn’t flinch. The contact was light, accidental almost, but it sent a jolt up his arm that had nothing to do with the residual nerve damage from the burn, and he realized he didn’t feel guilty anymore, didn’t feel like he was doing something wrong by wanting to spend more time with her.
He asked her if she wanted to come back to his place 10 minutes later, after the trivia host started yelling for everyone to grab their seats inside, told her he had three full photo albums of old fire crew shots and hand-drawn maps of every burn in the county dating back to 1990 that she could use for her program research. She didn’t say yes right away, just smiled and took a slow sip of her ice-cold lemonade, and he waited, his heart beating faster than it had since he’d run that 2018 fire line with a 60-pound pack on his back, half convinced she’d turn him down and go join the loggers for those schnapps shots.
When she nodded, he hid his grin by turning to grab his truck keys out of his jeans pocket, and they walked side by side to his beat-up 2008 F-150, the loose gravel crunching loud under their work boots. He opened the passenger door for her, his knuckles brushing hers when he reached to pull the door further open against the slant of the hill, and she paused halfway into the cab, reaching up to brush a dry pine needle off the shoulder of his faded red flannel shirt.
The crickets were chirping loud in the tall grass by the parking lot edge, and the first faint star of the night was just visible over the top of the mountain, when she slid into the seat and told him she was looking forward to seeing those maps.
