Roy Pacheco, 62, limps through the front door of The Burnt Pine at 7:12 sharp every Tuesday, left knee throbbing if he spent the day climbing ladders or hauling firewood like he did that morning. The bar smells like fried cheese curds and pine cleaner, the regulars holler a lazy greeting from the middle tables where they’re already scribbling trivia answers on crumpled napkins. He slides onto his usual scuffed vinyl stool at the far end of the bar, drops his faded U.S. Forest Service ball cap on the counter, and holds up two fingers for his usual cheap lager, no head. The scar on his knee, earned from a 2007 fall down a fire tower access trail, aches so bad he shifts his weight three times before he gets comfortable.
The hand that sets the beer down a second later isn’t the usual bartender’s calloused, tattooed paw. It’s smaller, sun-browned, a faint white scar snaking across the wrist from what looks like a surfing wipeout, the scent of coconut sunscreen and cinnamon gum curling up to hit him before he looks up. Lila Marquez leans against the bar opposite him, dark hair streaked with sunbleached honey strands, laugh lines fanning out from the corners of her warm brown eyes, and he freezes. He’d only met her once, 35 years prior, at his wedding to her older half-sister Elena, right before she moved to Maui to work as a surf instructor and never came back, not even for Elena’s funeral. She smirks, wipes a spot on the bar with a frayed rag, and says he still drinks the same garbage beer he snuck her in the parking lot after the reception when she was 17.
He flushes, runs a hand over the gray stubble on his jaw, and mumbles that he didn’t know she was back in town. She says she moved three weeks prior to help their mom recover from hip replacement surgery, picked up a few shifts at the bar to pass the time when she’s not driving her mom to physical therapy. For the next hour, he’s torn between leaning in when she leans across the bar to hand him a bowl of bar nuts (she remembered he hates dill pickles, so she picked them all out before setting the bowl down) and bolting for the door. It feels wrong, looking at her like that, like he’s betraying the 27 years he had with Elena, but every time her wrist brushes his when she passes him a refill, every time her knee bumps his under the bar when she bends to grab a glass from the lower shelf, every time she holds his gaze half a beat longer than necessary when he makes a dumb joke about the tourist groups that clog the town all summer, the guilt fades a little more, replaced by a warm, fuzzy buzz he hasn’t felt since before Elena got sick. The jukebox in the corner hums old Johnny Cash tracks, the ice in his beer clinks soft when he lifts it to his mouth, and he finds himself telling her stories about the fire towers, about the way the sun hits the Sierras at dawn so the whole range looks like it’s on fire, stories he hasn’t told anyone since Elena died.
The final trivia question pops up on the wall-mounted TV: What was the name of the 1988 wildfire that burned 400,000 acres across the Sierra Nevada? Roy knows the answer immediately, the Yellow Fire, he was stationed on the tower closest to the burn zone for three weeks straight, surviving on canned beans and bad coffee, but when he pushes off the stool to stand and yell the answer, his left knee locks up hard, shooting sharp, white-hot pain up his thigh. He stumbles, and Lila lunges across the bar to catch his arm, her palm warm and firm against his bicep, their faces inches apart, the peppermint of her gum mixing with the faint smoky scent of his flannel shirt between them. He admits he almost didn’t speak to her all night, thought it was messed up to even think about her as anything other than Elena’s little sister, and she snorts, rolls her eyes, and says Elena used to call her once a year to ask if she’d finally stopped crushing on the quiet, stubborn fire spotter she’d married. She says she’d have made a move years ago if she’d thought he’d be open to it, but she didn’t want to push when he was still grieving.
They yell the answer at the same time, win the $75 bar tab grand prize, and split a plate of extra crispy cheese curds while she finishes her shift. He drives her home to her mom’s ranch house on the edge of town when she locks up at 10, the cab of his beat-up Ford F-150 smelling like pine air freshener and her coconut sunscreen, the windows rolled down so the crisp October air whips through the cab. She stops on the front porch before unlocking the door, leans in, and kisses him slow, no rush, her hand on the side of his face, and he doesn’t pull away, doesn’t feel that sharp twist of guilt he’d expected to. When he turns the key in his truck ignition a minute later, the radio cuts on to the same Patsy Cline song Elena used to blast on their road trips up to the Oregon coast, and he smiles for the first time in months without feeling guilty.
