Rafe Mendez, 58, spent 32 years patrolling the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge before he retired last spring. His biggest flaw, per his former patrol partner Jake, is that he’d rather spend three days patching a hole in his old jon boat alone than suffer 10 minutes of small talk at any community event, a habit that’s only gotten worse since his wife Linda died of ovarian cancer three years prior. He’d only shown up to the fire department’s annual chili cookoff because Jake had showed up on his porch at 10 a.m. with a six pack of his favorite IPA and threatened to let the local 4-H club use his front yard for their goat show if he bailed.
He’d been leaning against a splintered pine picnic table for 45 minutes, nursing his second beer and picking at a bowl of chili so spicy it made his eyes water, when he turned too fast to avoid a kid chasing a golden retriever with a water gun. His shoulder slammed into the woman standing behind him, sending the plastic cup of iced tea in her hand sloshing, half its contents soaking the toe of his scuffed leather work boot.
“Shit, sorry, I wasn’t looking,” he said, grabbing a handful of napkins from the table to hand her. She waved it off, leaning in a little closer than most people would, the hem of her well-worn plaid flannel brushing his forearm as she dabbed at the wet spot on his boot with her own napkin. Rafe caught a whiff of jasmine shampoo mixed with the cedar scent of her jacket, and for half a second he forgot how to form a sentence. She was in her early 50s, hair streaked with silver pulled back in a loose braid, hazel eyes flecked with gold crinkling at the corners when she looked up at him.
“No harm done. Those kids are moving faster than the coyotes I saw raiding a chicken coop last week,” she said, holding his eye contact for two beats longer than polite, and Rafe felt his neck heat up. He’d spent the last three years actively avoiding any interaction that felt even remotely like flirting, convinced that wanting anything besides quiet, lonely routine was a betrayal of Linda’s memory, that he was too old, too set in his ways, too boring to be worth anyone’s time anyway. He almost mumbled an excuse to leave right then, but then she nodded at the patch on his jacket, the old refuge logo faded from years of sun and rain. “You used to work at the refuge? I’m Elara, the new county librarian. I’ve been begging the parks department to donate old field guides for the kids’ section for months, no one’s gotten back to me.”
Rafe blinked. He had three boxes of beat-up field guides stacked in his garage, ones he’d collected since he was a teenager, annotated with his own notes about where he’d spotted rare birds, where the best blackberry patches grew, the time a baby elk had followed him for two miles back to the ranger station. He’d been meaning to drop them off somewhere, but he’d never gotten around to it, couldn’t bear to give them to someone who wouldn’t care what the scribbles in the margins meant.
“I got a whole stack of those at my place,” he said, before he could talk himself out of it. “Most have my dumb notes in the margins, but if the kids don’t mind that, I can bring ‘em by tomorrow.”
Elara’s face lit up, and she laughed, a low, warm sound that cut through the noise of the country cover band playing near the beer tent, the yells of the chili judges announcing the winners down the line. She slapped his bicep lightly when he told her about the time he’d gotten sprayed by a skunk while trying to rescue a group of boy scouts who’d wandered off trail, and he didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away, the weight of the last three years feeling a little lighter for the first time.
They talked for another hour, the sun dipping low enough to paint the sky pink and orange, until Elara glanced at her phone and said she had to head home, her rescue greyhound was probably chewing up her couch cushions by now. Rafe walked her to her beat-up old Toyota pickup, pausing on the gravel next to the driver’s side door. She pulled a foil-covered container out of her cooler in the bed of the truck, handing it to him, their fingers brushing when he took it.
“That’s my peach cobbler, won first place at the fair last year. Don’t eat it all in one sitting,” she said, winking, before she climbed in the truck and rolled down the window. “I’ll be at the library until 5 tomorrow. Don’t be late.”
Rafe stood there holding the container, the warmth of it seeping through the foil into his palms, until her truck turned the corner out of the parking lot. He got in his own truck, setting the cobbler on the passenger seat next to him, and turned the key. The radio came on, playing the old Linda Ronstadt song he and Linda used to dance to in their kitchen after dinner, and he smiled, no twist of guilt in his chest this time, just quiet, soft excitement. He pulled out of the parking lot, already making a mental list of which field guides he’d grab first, and didn’t look back.
