Ray Voss, 62, spent 28 years on wildland fire crews before a 2018 blaze on the Lolo National Forest took his crew lead and left a jagged pale scar snaking up his left forearm. These days he runs a small firewood delivery and forest restoration outfit out of his ramshackle property outside Missoula, and he’s spent the last 12 years deliberately avoiding anything that resembles a romantic connection, ever since his wife packed her bags and left for Boise with a dental hygienist she’d met at a PTA meeting. His niece had all but dragged him to the town’s Fourth of July picnic that afternoon, calling him a hermit who was going to rot alone in his cabin if he didn’t talk to another human being who wasn’t buying oak firewood or asking him to thin their pine stands.
He’d been leaning against the dented side of his 2008 Ford F-150 for 45 minutes, sipping a lukewarm Bud Light that sweated through the paper koozie in his hand, half watching a group of preteens set off illegal firecrackers in the ditch, when he spotted her. Clara Hale, 58, runs the used bookstore on Front Street, ex-wife of the county sheriff who’d retired last year. Everyone in town still treated her like she was off limits, even though they’d finalized their divorce four years prior, no custody fights, no messy drama, just two people who’d outgrown each other. She was carrying a tray of peach cobbler, sun catching the auburn streaks in her gray hair, cutoff jean shorts showing off the faint freckles across her bare calves, a faded 1987 Dolly Parton tour shirt hanging loose off her shoulders. He’d spoken to her twice before: once when he’d dropped a free half cord of fir at her place last winter after her furnace died, and she’d brought him a blackberry pie in return, and once when her tabby cat got stuck 30 feet up a ponderosa pine on his property, and he’d climbed up to get it. He’d avoided her ever since, because the way she’d smiled at him when he handed her the cat had made his chest feel tight, the same way it used to feel when he was standing on a ridge waiting for a fire to shift, equal parts alert and terrified.
She spotted him before he could duck behind the truck bed, waved, and started walking over, the tray balanced in one hand. The ground was rutted from weeks of rain and a dozen ATVs driving across the field that day, and she caught her boot on a clump of grass, stumbling forward. He reacted faster than he thought he would, reaching out to catch her elbow, his calloused palm brushing the soft, warm skin of her upper arm, and she stumbled into his chest for half a second, her hand pressing flat against his sternum through his worn fire department t-shirt. He could smell coconut sunscreen and baked peach on her, the faint tang of lemonade on her breath when she laughed, pulling back just far enough to look up at him. “Sorry about that,” she said, grinning, her fingers still lingering on his chest for a beat before she dropped them. “I’m notoriously clumsy when I’m trying to get someone’s attention.”
He froze, his first instinct to mumble an excuse about having to get back to his cabin to feed his dog, grab his keys, leave before he did something stupid. He’d spent 12 years convincing himself relationships were more trouble than they were worth, that letting someone get close just meant you had more to lose, that the gossip from the town busybodies who still thought Clara belonged to her ex wasn’t worth the hassle. But then she held up the tray of cobbler, the crust still glistening with butter, and said she’d brought extra, because she’d heard him tell the feed store clerk last month that peaches were his favorite summer fruit. No one had paid that much attention to the things he said in years.
They stood by the truck for the next 20 minutes, talking, her shoulder brushing his every time a group of people walked past, leaning in when he told the story of the 2007 Idaho fire that had burned 30,000 acres, holding eye contact for a beat longer than polite every time he finished a sentence. When he lifted his arm to scratch the scar on his forearm, she reached out, running the tip of her index finger lightly along the raised edge of the tissue, her thumb brushing the rough callus on his wrist. “Scars like that mean you’ve got good stories,” she said, and he didn’t pull away. The part of him that had spent so long shutting everyone out was screaming that this was a mistake, that he was going to get hurt, that everyone in town was staring, but the bigger part, the part that hadn’t felt anyone’s touch that wasn’t a handshake or a pat on the back in a decade, was warm, buzzing, like he’d just drank a shot of good bourbon on a cold day.
The first firework boomed overhead, painting the darkening sky neon pink, and she tugged his wrist, pulling him toward the edge of the field, past the crowd of families spread out on blankets, to a spot behind an ancient gnarled oak, far enough away that no one would see them if they didn’t look too hard. The next firework exploded red, painting her cheeks pink, and she leaned up, kissing him slow, her hand tangling in the gray hair at the nape of his neck. He kissed her back, his hand settling on the small of her back, pulling her closer, the distant boom of the fireworks rattling in his chest, the taste of sweet tea on her lips, the feel of her body pressed against his chasing away every last one of the excuses he’d spent 12 years repeating to himself. He didn’t care about the gossip, didn’t care about the risk, didn’t care about all the reasons he’d told himself this was a bad idea.
When the last firework fizzled out and the crowd started cheering, packing up their coolers and blankets, she pulled back, grinning, wiping a smudge of cobbler crumb from the corner of his mouth. “I’ve got a half gallon of vanilla bean ice cream in my cooler back at my place,” she said, nodding toward her beat-up Subaru parked two rows over. “Figured we could finish the cobbler there, if you don’t have anywhere to be.” He nodded, grabbing his frayed denim jacket from the bed of his truck, tossing the empty beer can in the trash can by the parking lot edge. When he caught up to her, he laced his fingers through hers, and he noticed the “Support Your Local Wildland Firefighter” sticker on the back of her Subaru window that he’d never seen before.
