Wendell “Wen” Hoff, 62, spent 28 years as a US Forest Service fire spotter, perched alone in 100-foot towers across central Idaho before retiring to a small cedar cabin outside Missoula 18 months prior. His most obvious flaw? He still defaults to assuming any attention from a woman is just polite small talk, a habit forged from months at a time without human interaction, and he carried a thick, silvery scar snaking up his left forearm from a 2017 blaze he’d almost been trapped in, a reminder he’d gotten too comfortable ignoring his surroundings once before. He’d lost his wife of 34 years to ovarian cancer 21 months earlier, and her lifelong best friend had cornered him at the memorial to tell him he owed it to her memory to wait two full years before even thinking about seeing anyone else. He’d nodded, like he agreed, and hadn’t so much as bought a woman a drink since.
He was perched at the corner of the bar at the VFW post-harvest festival celebration that Saturday, nursing a neat bourbon, pine sap still crusted on the laces of his work boots from mending a stretch of fence on his property that morning, when Mara slid onto the stool two spots down. She was 58, ran the used bookstore on Main Street that had opened three months prior, and he’d only spoken to her twice before, once when he’d dropped off a box of his wife’s old mystery novels, once when she’d waved him down to help her lift a heavy shelf into her truck. The bar was packed, a group of college kids from the university piling in to grab pitchers of cheap lager, and she shifted closer to his stool to make room, her denim-clad knee brushing his bare calf where his jeans had ridden up. He flinched so hard he sloshed a drop of bourbon onto the bar top, and she laughed, low and warm, wiping it up with a napkin she pulled from her pocket. “Sorry about that,” she said, and her eyes were the color of honey in the dim neon light of the beer sign above the bar.
They started talking, first about the lousy parade float the high school FFA had put together, then about the record cold snap they’d had the week prior that had nipped half the town’s apple crop. She mentioned she’d found a tattered 1990s fire spotter’s log in a box of estate sale books she’d picked up the week before, full of scribbled notes about cloud formations and deer sightings and a handful of terrible love poems written in the margins, and she leaned in to show him a photo of it on her phone, her shoulder pressing firm against his upper arm. He could smell cinnamon and old paper and lavender in her hair, and his throat went dry, the voice of his wife’s friend ringing in his head, sharp as a fire alarm: Too soon. You don’t get to move on that fast. He wanted to make an excuse to leave, to go home to his quiet cabin and his old radio and not feel this twisting mess of guilt and want in his gut, but he found himself leaning in too, pointing out a note about a smoke plume on the log that he’d actually been the one to report back in 1996.
By 10 p.m. most of the crowd had cleared out, the jukebox spitting out slow Johnny Cash deep cuts, and she asked if he wanted to walk her home, only three blocks away, because the streetlights were out on her side of town. He hesitated for half a second, then nodded, grabbing his faded Carhartt jacket off the back of the stool. The air was crisp, sharp with the smell of burnt caramel from the leftover kettle corn stands and fallen pine needles, and when they passed the community orchard on the corner, she stopped to grab a windfall apple off the grass, wiping it on her jeans before holding it out to him. Their fingers brushed when he took it, calloused from hauling firewood and fixing fences against her softer ones, ink-stained from marking book spines, and he didn’t pull away.
She stopped at her porch steps, turning to face him, the porch light gilding the edges of her hair. “I’ve been wanting to ask you to dinner for three weeks,” she said, no preamble, no awkward fumbling. “I didn’t want to push, but I figured I’d rather get rejected than keep staring at your pickup truck when it drives past the store.” He stared at her for a long minute, the weight of that 21 month mark, of that stupid promise he’d never even agreed to, sitting heavy on his chest. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to,” he said, quiet, and he held up his left arm, the scar glinting in the light, “Thought I’d get in trouble for moving too fast.” She laughed, reaching out to rest her hand on the raised, rough skin of the scar, no flinch, no hesitation. “Whoever told you that doesn’t get to make the rules for you,” she said.
He leaned in then, kissed her slow, the taste of bourbon and the crisp apple he’d just bit into mixing with the mint of her lip balm, and her hand curled around his forearm, holding him close. He stayed for dinner that night, the lasagna she’d baked that morning sitting on her kitchen table, Patsy Cline playing low on her record player, and when he left at 1 a.m., he didn’t even feel guilty. When he got back to his cabin, he pulled the tattered, folded 1996 fire zone map he’d kept rolled up in his toolbox for 27 years out from under his workbench, setting it on the kitchen counter to bring to her the next morning.
