Ronan O’Malley, 62, retired smokejumper turned wildfire mitigation consultant, had only shown up to the West Boise block party because his 16-year-old granddaughter threatened to post his 1998 crew photos—shirtless, mullet, face covered in ash—to his neighborhood Facebook group if he didn’t stop hiding out in his log cabin-style home. He’d spent eight years as a self-imposed hermit after his wife Maureen died of ovarian cancer, his only regular interactions with clients, his old jump crew, and the golden retriever he’d adopted after her death. His biggest flaw, one he’d never admit out loud, was that he’d turned guilt into a perverse love language; if he suffered alone, he figured, he was honoring her memory properly.
He leaned against the thick bark of a ponderosa pine, cold Coors sweating through the paper koozie in his hand, work boots caked in pine sap from clearing brush that morning, when he spotted Elara Voss across the lawn. She’d moved into the blue ranch three houses down three months prior, 55, elementary school art teacher fresh off a divorce from a husband who’d left her for his 28-year-old paralegal. The neighborhood gossips had already branded her a flight risk, the kind of woman who’d mess with the block’s carefully curated dynamic, and Ronan had gone out of his way to avoid her, even crossing the street when he saw her watering her roses. He’d told himself it was to avoid drama, but the truth was he’d caught himself staring at the paint splotches on her forearms when she carried canvases into her house, and the twist of desire in his gut made him sick to his stomach.
She caught him staring that evening, sun dipping low enough to paint the sky tangerine, the air thick with the smell of grilled bratwurst and hickory smoke, kids screaming as they chased each other with water guns. She waved, grinning, holding a glass of pale rosé in one hand, and started walking over before he could duck behind the tree. She got close enough that he could smell jasmine shampoo and the faint citrus of her drink, the hem of her linen button down dotted with blue paint, her bare feet in scuffed white converse. “I’ve been meaning to corner you,” she said, leaning in a little so he could hear her over the noise of the party, her shoulder brushing his bicep through his faded smokejumper hoodie. He flinched at first, then relaxed, the heat of her seeping through the fabric. She said her sister had lost her house in the Maui fires, and she’d seen the mitigation signs he’d posted on his property line, wanted to ask how to protect her own home.
He found himself talking longer than he’d talked to anyone outside his family in years, walking her through how to clear brush 30 feet from the foundation, what kind of siding was most fire resistant, the story behind the thick, jagged scar running down his left forearm from a 2017 blaze outside Bend where he’d lost his left pinky pulling a rookie out of a burning tree stand. She reached out, her fingers brushing the scar lightly, her hand warm and calloused from holding paintbrushes, and he felt his neck flush. “That must have been terrifying,” she said, no pity in her voice, just soft curiosity, and he realized he hadn’t told that story to anyone who didn’t already know it in almost a decade. He tensed, waiting for the guilt to hit, the voice in his head that said he was betraying Maureen by talking to another woman, but it didn’t come.
When someone yelled that the annual cornhole tournament was starting, Elara asked him to be her partner. He glanced over at the group of retired teacher’s aides that had been Maureen’s friends, saw them whispering behind their plastic cups, and hesitated for half a second before saying yes. She was terrible at cornhole, snorting so hard she spilled rosé on her jeans when she threw a bag straight into the grass, and when he stepped behind her to show her how to hold the bag, her hip pressed to his, her hair falling over her shoulder against his chest, he didn’t pull away. They came in second, losing to a pair of 12-year-olds, and she cheered so loud she clapped her hands over her mouth, grinning up at him like he’d won a national championship.
By 9 p.m. most of the crowd had cleared out, string lights strung between the pines glowing soft gold, crickets chirping loud in the grass. Elara said she had a bottle of 12-year-old Irish whiskey he’d mentioned liking in a passing conversation weeks prior, asked if he wanted to come over for a nightcap. He thought about the gossips, about the photo of Maureen on his kitchen counter, about the guilt he’d carried for eight years, and nodded. They walked down the quiet street, their hands brushing twice on the sidewalk, and the second time he laced his fingers through hers, her hand smaller than his, calloused at the fingertips, fitting perfectly between his. He didn’t care who saw. She fumbled for her keys on the porch, the porch light gilding the edges of her hair, and leaned in to kiss him slow, the taste of rosé and mint lip balm on her mouth, and he kissed her back, the last of the guilt melting away, remembering Maureen had told him two weeks before she died that if he moped around the rest of his life she’d haunt him so bad he’d never get a good night’s sleep again. She pushed the front door open, pulled him inside, and the screen door clicked shut behind them.
