Manny Rios, 62, retired smokejumper turned fly-tying supply shop owner, swiped sweat off the back of his neck with the edge of his faded Gila National Forest work shirt. The July sun baked the small town fair’s asphalt, the air thick with the smell of fried Oreos, pine sawdust, and the reedy twang of a local country band covering 90s Travis Tritt. He’d avoided the fair for seven straight years after his wife died, but his part-time employee begged off last minute for a family emergency, so he’d dragged three folding tables of rooster feathers, tungsten bead heads, and pre-tied dry flies down to the vendor strip at 6 that morning. He still held on to the stupid, stubborn idea that any small joy he allowed himself was a betrayal of the 32 years he’d had with Ellen, a flaw that had turned his small cabin on the mountain into a hermitage for the better part of a decade.
She showed up around 2, her sun hat slung low over hazel eyes crinkled at the corners from decades of laughing too loud. He knew who she was immediately: Clara Hale, wife of the new county commissioner, the guy who’d cut the ribbon for the fair an hour earlier, who’d posed for 40 photos with 4-H kids and hadn’t glanced her way once the whole time. She leaned in across his table, close enough that he could smell jasmine perfume and the sweet tang of iced tea on her breath, and asked for a beginner’s tying kit for her 14-year-old grandson, who’d just gotten his first fly rod for his birthday. When he reached across the table to grab the kit, their forearms brushed, the soft skin of her wrist catching on the thick, raised scar running up his left bicep from the 2017 Lolo Peak fire. She held eye contact a full beat longer than polite, her fingers brushing the edge of the scar for half a second before she pulled back, like she’d touched something she wasn’t supposed to but didn’t regret it.
He tried to keep the interaction professional, gave her a 10% discount, told her to have her grandson stop by the shop if he had questions about technique. He thought that was the end of it, until she showed back up an hour later holding two dripping cold lemonades, condensation running down the sides of the plastic cups. She sat on the edge of the folding chair next to his booth, her knee almost brushing his, and asked about the scar. He told her the story, how the team had gotten trapped under a fallen cedar for 12 hours, how two of his crew didn’t make it out. She didn’t give him the polite, pitying nod most people did. She listened, her hand resting on his knee for two quiet seconds when he finished, and said that sounded like the kind of thing that sticks with you forever. He flinched, not because the touch was unwelcome, but because it lit a fire in his chest he’d thought was doused for good when Ellen died.
He tried to pull back for the rest of the afternoon, kept his answers short when she wandered back every hour or so, helped a dozen other customers, pretended he didn’t notice when she stood off to the side watching him explain a parachute adams fly to a group of teen boys. By 9, the sun was dipping below the mountains, the band was packing up their gear, and the last of the food vendors were dousing their grills with buckets of water. She hung back, helping him stack boxes of feathers and hooks into the bed of his beat-up 2008 Ford F150, even when he told her she didn’t have to. He dropped a small box of grizzly rooster feathers halfway to the truck, and they both bent down to pick it up at the same time, their foreheads bumping soft enough that it didn’t hurt, and they both laughed, quiet and a little shaky, before she leaned in and kissed him. It was quick at first, just a press of her lips against his, tasting like lemon and mint gum, before she deepened it, her hand curled around the back of his neck. He kissed her back for three full seconds, every cell in his body screaming to keep going, before he pulled away, his chest heaving.
“I can’t do this,” he said, his voice rough. “Your husband’s a good guy. I don’t mess with married women.”
She wiped her thumb across the corner of her mouth, her eyes soft, no anger there. “He hasn’t kissed me like that in 12 years,” she said. “I’m not asking for a ring. I’m not asking for anyone to find out. I’m just asking for one night where someone sees me, not the commissioner’s wife.”
He stared at her for a long minute, the crickets chirping loud in the grass at the edge of the fairgrounds, the last of the fairgoers’ car taillights disappearing down the main road. He thought of all the nights he’d sat alone in his cabin, drinking cheap beer and watching old westerns, convinced he didn’t deserve to feel anything but grief for the rest of his life. He thought of Ellen, how she’d always told him he was too hard on himself, how she’d have kicked his ass if she knew he’d spent eight years turning down any chance at happiness just because she was gone.
He nodded, jerking his chin toward his truck. “I got a cabin 20 minutes up the mountain. No cell service. No neighbors.”
She smiled, the crinkles around her eyes deepening, and walked back to her silver SUV parked three spots over. He climbed into his truck, turned the key, and waited for her to pull out behind him before he merged onto the highway, the cool mountain air pouring through the open window, carrying the smell of pine and the distant lowing of cattle in a pasture off the side of the road.
