Rafe Mendoza, 62, retired wildland firefighter, leans against the scuffed bar of the Oakridge Tavern, a half-drunk Pabst in one hand, and tries not to fidget. It’s the annual crew reunion, the first one since his old chief, Jake, passed last winter, and he almost bailed three times on the drive over. His flaw is old, well-worn: 30 years of dropping everything at the first sound of a fire alarm left him unable to commit to anything that doesn’t have a clear end date, even now, 8 years off the line. He still keeps a fully packed go bag by his front door, refuses to make plans more than 48 hours out, hasn’t spoken to his own daughter in 15 years after he missed her high school graduation to respond to a blaze in the Gorge.
The bar smells like fried cheese curds and stale beer, the jukebox spitting out Johnny Cash deep cuts between the roar of old war stories from the crew scattered across the booths. A woman walks in, flannel tied around her waist, work boots caked in mud, sun-bleached auburn hair pulled back in a loose braid, and Rafe’s throat goes dry before he can stop it. He’s horrified for half a second—this is Jake’s daughter, Lila, the pigtailed kid who used to bring the crew chocolate chip cookies when they rolled back to the station after two week deployments, who he changed the diaper of once when her mom was in the ER with appendicitis. He has no business noticing how the sleeves of her white t-shirt are rolled up to show freckled forearms, or the way her jeans fit just right across her hips.
She spots him immediately, grinning, and walks over, standing close enough that he can smell pine soap and vanilla shampoo on her skin. Her elbow brushes his when she reaches for the seltzer the bartender slides her, and the skin where they touch tingles for a full minute after. “You’re Rafe, right?” she says, holding eye contact longer than most people do, no shyness in her hazel, gold-flecked eyes, the same crinkle at the corners as her dad’s when she smiles. She’s 41, he remembers, a traveling physical therapist, drives cross country working with injured wildland firefighters. She came to the reunion to drop off Jake’s old crew jacket, the one he left to Rafe in his will, stitched with his name and the crew number on the chest.
When she pulls it out of the canvas bag slung over her shoulder, her arm brushes his chest, and he can feel the heat of her skin through his thin cotton t-shirt. He runs a finger over the stitching, his throat tight, and tells her the story of Jake falling off the back of the fire truck chasing a skunk that stole his lunch sandwich. She snorts when she laughs, loud and unselfconscious, and he laughs too, a real laugh, the kind he hasn’t had since Jake died. For an hour they talk, leaning in closer every few minutes, her hand brushing his when she passes him her phone to show photos of Jake’s geriatric golden retriever that still thinks he’s a puppy. He fights the urge to tuck a strand of hair that falls in her face behind her ear, tells himself he’s a creep, that she’s young enough to be his kid, that Jake would kick his ass so hard he’d be spitting dirt for a week.
She must see the conflict on his face, because she leans in even closer, her voice low enough that only he can hear it over the din of the bar. “I still have that zippo you gave me for my 16th birthday,” she says, pulling a dented silver lighter out of her purse, the engraving of a fire helmet on the front worn but still legible. Rafe blinks, he doesn’t even remember buying it, he was so checked out back then he barely remembered his own birthday most years. “I thought you were the coolest guy alive back then,” she says, not looking away. “Wondered when you’d stop running long enough to let someone catch up.”
The last of the crew files out an hour later, the bartender stacking chairs on the tables, flipping off the neon beer signs in the window. Lila tilts her head at him, chewing on her lower lip. “I don’t feel like driving back to Portland tonight,” she says. “You know a quiet spot to sit for a while?”
He nods, leads her to his beat up Ford F150 parked out front, tells her to follow him to the overlook above the Umpqua River he used to drive to after bad fires to clear his head. Ten minutes later they’re leaning against the hood of his truck, the sun dipping low over the treeline, painting the sky pink and tangerine, the river glinting like crushed copper below them. Their shoulders brush, and she turns to him, leaning in, kissing him soft, no hurry, no pressure. He doesn’t pull away.
He tells her he has a small cabin 20 minutes down the road, no plans for the weekend, no go bag required. She grins, slipping her hand into his, her palm soft against his calloused, scarred knuckles. He tugs her closer, the faint scent of vanilla shampoo mixing with the pine of the surrounding forest, as the last sliver of sun dips below the treeline.
