Rusty Pritchard, 62, retired forest fire spotter, had avoided the Nevada County Peach Festival for seven straight years, ever since his wife Linda died mid-chew of their shared cobbler, her head lolling against his shoulder before the paramedics even got there. He’d spent 38 years manning a 70-foot lookout tower in the Tahoe National Forest, trained to spot a wisp of smoke 20 miles out, but these days he could barely spot a reason to leave his cabin before noon. That changed when his 12-year-old next door neighbor taped a free festival pass to his screen door, scrawled with a crayon peach and the note “You look sad.” He’d stuffed the pass in his flannel pocket and showed up an hour before closing, sun hanging low enough to gild the tops of the oak trees, the air thick with sugar and wood smoke from the food truck grills.
He was third in line for the cobbler stand when someone’s canvas tote banged into his hip. He turned, ready to snap, and found himself staring at Marnie Cole, 58, ex-wife of his old fire crew partner Jase. She had peach juice glistening on the side of her thumb, gray streaks in her chestnut hair pulled back with a red gingham bandana, and the same gap between her two front teeth he’d thought about more times than he’d ever admit back when he and Jase were pulling 24-hour shifts during fire season. She was wearing worn Levi’s and a linen work shirt unbuttoned one too many notches, freckles he’d never noticed before scattered across her collarbones, a faint scar snaking up her left wrist from when Jase dropped a chainsaw on her during a 2009 crew barbecue.
“Rusty,” she said, grinning, and her voice was rougher than he remembered, like she still smoked the menthols she used to sneak behind Jase’s back. “Thought you’d hidden yourself up in that tower forever.”
He tensed up first, ready to mumble an excuse and leave, but then she held up a jar of neon orange jam, popping the lid to wave it under his nose. It smelled like peaches and habanero, sharp and sweet, and she held out a plastic sample spoon for him to take. Their fingers brushed when he grabbed it, calluses catching on each other, and he felt a jolt go up his arm he hadn’t felt since Linda was alive. The jam hit his tongue sweet first, then the heat bloomed at the back of his throat, and he coughed so hard his eyes watered. She laughed, handing him a crumpled paper napkin, and leaned against the side of her jam booth, her shoulder pressing against his. No one was looking, the crowd too busy chasing after kids or yelling over the bluegrass band playing off by the beer garden, but he could feel the heat of her through his shirt, smell her perfume, something like cedar and ripe fruit, not cloying, just there.
He kept waiting for the pity to kick in, for her to say she was sorry about Linda, for the conversation to swerve into the soft, careful territory everyone stuck to with him these days, but she didn’t. She ranted about Jase’s new wife who posted 10 times a day about their “off-grid homestead” that had a Tesla charger and a whole-home air fryer, told him about the time she’d seen him climb a 100-foot ponderosa mid-fire to rescue a baby hawk, said Linda had told her that story a dozen times, thought it was the sexiest thing she’d ever heard. He froze, half-expecting to feel guilty, half-expecting to feel that hollow ache he got every time someone said Linda’s name, but instead he just laughed, a real loud laugh that hurt his ribs.
The bluegrass band shifted to a slow waltz, the same one he and Linda had danced to at their wedding reception in a barn outside Grass Valley, and he tensed up again, ready to bolt. But Marnie held out her hand, her palm calloused from stirring 40-pound pots of jam at 5 a.m., her nails chipped with peach stain. He stared at it for 10 full seconds, his brain screaming that this was wrong, that Jase was still his friend, that Linda would hate this, that he was supposed to be the loyal widower who never looked at another woman. But then he thought about the seven years he’d spent alone, eating frozen dinners in front of the TV, never letting anyone get close enough to see he wasn’t just the quiet guy who used to spot fires. He took her hand.
They didn’t dance, not really, just swayed a little off to the side of the booth, her head resting light against his shoulder, his hand loose around her waist. No one paid them any mind. When the song ended, she pulled back, her thumb brushing the corner of his mouth to wipe away a smudge of jam he didn’t even know was there, leaving a sticky, warm spot on his skin. She said she closed up the booth in 15 minutes, asked if he wanted to split that cobbler he’d been waiting for, then head back to her place, she had a jar of 2021 vintage habanero jam she’d saved, the year the peaches were extra sweet because of the late spring frost that had wiped out half the crop. He nodded, no overthinking, no worrying about what anyone would say, no counting the days until he could go back to hiding in his cabin. He watched her tuck a stray strand of gray hair behind her ear, the sun catching the tiny gold hoop in her left earlobe, and reached down to brush a dry peach leaf off the shoulder of her shirt, his fingers lingering just long enough for her to lean into the touch.
