Rafe Ortega, 62, retired hotshot crew boss turned custom chainsaw carver, has patrolled every square mile of the Roosevelt National Forest for 32 years, but nothing prepared him for the jolt he gets when he turns from the fundraiser grill, brisket tongs in hand, and slams straight into Elara Voss.
He’s got smoke stinging his eyes, a streak of grease on his left cheek, and the pitcher of peach lemonade she’s holding sloshes over the rim, soaking the front of his faded fire department tee. The liquid is ice cold against his sun-warmed skin, and he steps back fast, stammering an apology, before he registers who she is. Elara. Widow of his old crew partner Jesse, who died on a blaze outside of Fort Collins 11 years prior. Rafe hasn’t spoken more than three words to her since Jesse’s funeral, even though they live 12 minutes apart in the same tiny mountain town. He’d convinced himself it was disrespectful, to Jesse, to his own wife Maria who’d passed from ovarian cancer 8 years back, to even look at her too long. The thought of her had lingered in the back of his mind for years, a guilty, quiet ache he’d beaten down every time it popped up.
She’s laughing, low and rough, like she still sneaks the occasional menthol cigarette when no one’s watching, and she grabs his elbow to hold him steady before he trips over a cinder block holding up the grill leg. Her hand is small, soft, calloused only at the tips of her fingers from turning the pages of library books all day—she’s run the town’s tiny public library for 19 years, he knows, from the flyers taped up at the general store. “Easy there, Ortega,” she says, and her voice is warmer than the August sun beating down on the back of his neck. “I’d hate for the town’s favorite carver to take a tumble into the baked beans.”
The crowd around them is loud, kids chasing each other with water guns, the fire chief yelling raffle numbers over a crackling speaker, but it fades to static when she pulls a crumpled paper napkin from her jeans pocket and dabs at the lemonade stain on his chest. Her knuckles brush the hair on his sternum through the thin cotton, and he freezes, his tongue suddenly too thick for his mouth. He should step back. He should make an excuse to go back to flipping burgers. He should run, even. But he can’t move, not when she’s standing that close, her vanilla pine perfume mixing with the smell of charcoal and scorched brisket, her hazel eyes locked on his like she’s been waiting for this moment as long as he has.
He finds himself asking her if she wants a beer, before he can talk himself out of it. She nods, and he leads her to the empty picnic table tucked behind the food tent, out of view of the rest of the party. The gravel crunches under their scuffed work boots, and when they sit, their knees brush under the table, neither of them moving away. She tells him she’s been asking about him for months, that she’s seen the carvings he leaves by the trailheads, the grinning bear holding a storybook he left propped by the library entrance last spring. She says Jesse used to talk about how Rafe was the only guy on the crew he’d trust with his life, with anything, even his family.
The guilt hits him sharp, fast, and he looks away, staring at the line of dark pine trees across the field. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” he says, his voice rough, like he’s been yelling over fire wind all day. “It feels wrong. Like we’re betraying them.”
She reaches across the table, covers his calloused, scarred hand with hers, and he flinches before he relaxes into the touch. “They’ve been gone long enough,” she says, soft, no judgment in her tone. “They’d be laughing their asses off that we’ve spent this long being miserable alone because we thought we owed it to them to be sad forever.”
He looks back at her, and the golden hour light is catching the gray streaks in her auburn hair, there’s a smudge of BBQ sauce on the corner of her lip, and he realizes he’s not guilty anymore. He’s just tired of being alone. He lifts his hand, brushes his thumb across her lip to wipe the sauce off, and she leans into the touch, her eyes fluttering shut for half a second.
They sit there for another hour, talking about nothing and everything, their knees still pressed together under the table, their hands tangled on top of it, while the party winds down behind them. By the time the fire chief yells that they’re packing up the last of the coolers, the sun is dipping below the mountains, painting the sky streaky pink and tangerine. He walks her to her beat-up old pickup, and when she leans in to kiss him, he doesn’t hesitate, the taste of peach lemonade and mint gum on her lips, his hand on the small of her back pulling her closer.
He follows her back to her house in his own truck, the windows rolled down, the cool mountain air blowing through his graying hair, and he doesn’t feel guilty once the whole drive.
