Earl Hagerty is 57, spent 22 years as a U.S. Forest Service smokejumper before a blown knee on a 2020 blaze in the Bitterroot Range pushed him into early retirement. Now he runs a tiny fly-fishing guide service out of his one-room cabin 12 miles outside Missoula, lives on canned chili and wild blackberry pie he bakes himself, and only comes into town once a week for the Tuesday trivia night at The Split Rail roadhouse. His biggest flaw, the one he won’t admit out loud even to his old jump team buddies, is that he’s spent the last 8 years avoiding anything resembling a date, convinced his scarred knuckles, smoke-roughened voice, and habit of leaving half-carved wooden trout scattered on every flat surface in his house make him too much of a hassle for anyone to put up with long term.
The bar smells like stale beer and fried cheese curds the Tuesday Clara Bennett sits down at the table adjacent to his. He recognizes her immediately: she’s the new head librarian, moved to town three months prior from Portland after her daughter left for NYU, the kind of woman who wears frayed cardigans even in 80-degree heat and tucks ballpoint pens behind her ear like they’re hair clips. Everyone in town calls her “the quiet one,” jokes that she’d probably faint if she heard a single curse word, and Earl had written her off as completely out of his orbit the second he’d seen her restocking the nature section at the library a month prior, when he’d gone looking for 1970s fire atlas maps to mark secret fishing spots.
He’s halfway through his second IPA, arguing with his teammate about the correct answer to a category on 1990s Western films, when he reaches for the shared pitcher at the exact same time she does. Their hands brush first, her knuckles soft, smudged with blue ink from stamping library books, his rough with calluses and crisscrossed with thin old burn scars. He yanks his hand back like he’s touched a hot stove, mumbles an apology, but she just laughs, a low, warm sound that cuts through the hum of the jukebox playing Johnny Cash’s *Folsom Prison Blues*. “It’s all yours,” she says, nodding at the pitcher. “My team’s already three IPAs deep and they’re starting to yell answers at the trivia host before he finishes reading the questions. They don’t need more fuel.”
He can’t think of a single thing to say back, so he just grunts, pours himself a beer, and spends the next 20 minutes sneaking glances at her out of the corner of his eye. She leans forward when her team debates answers, elbows on the sticky Formica table, and bites the corner of her lower lip when she’s concentrating. Once she catches him looking, raises an eyebrow, and smirks before turning back to her team, and his face gets so hot he’s convinced he’s still standing in the middle of a wildfire.
The final question, the one that breaks the tie between their two teams, is about the full tracklist of Nirvana’s *Nevermind*. Both of them stand up at the exact same time to yell the correct answer, bumping shoulders so hard she stumbles backward a step. He reaches out without thinking, catches her by the waist, his palm flat against the soft cotton of her cardigan, and he can feel the warmth of her skin through the fabric, the faint scent of lavender and old paper clinging to her hair. He freezes, ready to pull away, apologize again, go hide in his truck for the rest of the night, but she doesn’t step back. She just tilts her head up, hazel eyes flecked with green crinkling at the corners, and says, “Nice reflexes. You get that practice jumping out of planes or just tripping over fishing nets in the woods?”
He blinks. He didn’t think she even knew who he was, let alone what he did for work. “Uh,” he says, eloquent as ever, “both, mostly.” His team cheers behind him, they won by a single point, but he doesn’t even look at them. He’s still holding her waist, his thumb brushing the edge of her belt loop by accident, and she doesn’t move away.
After the host hands his team the $50 bar tab prize, she walks over to his table, holds out a folded piece of neon pink paper. It’s a flyer for a stargazing event the library is hosting next Saturday, a local astronomy club bringing a telescope powerful enough to see the rings of Saturn. Her phone number is scrawled in blue ink on the back, underlined twice. “I know you probably spend most nights out in the woods staring at stars anyway,” she says, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, like she’s nervous, “but I’d save you a spot next to me. If you want. No pressure.”
For half a second, his old instinct kicks in, the one that tells him he’ll mess this up, that he’s too rough, too set in his ways, that a woman who spends all day around books and poetry has no business hanging out with a guy who once spent three days living off granola bars and rainwater in a fire camp. But then he looks at her, the pen still tucked behind her ear, a faint smudge of ink on her jaw, and he nods. “I’ll be there,” he says.
They stand in the gravel parking lot for 20 minutes after the bar closes, talking, the air thick with the smell of pine and cut grass, crickets chirping so loud they almost have to raise their voices to hear each other. He tells her about the time he jumped a fire outside Yellowstone and landed in a patch of prickly pear, she tells him about the time a kid brought a live garter snake into the library in his backpack and she had to carry it outside by the tail. When he walks her to her beat-up Subaru, she leans in and hugs him quick, her shoulder pressing firm against his chest, before she climbs in the driver’s seat.
He stands in the parking lot until her taillights disappear around the bend in the road, the flyer crumpled in the pocket of his worn flannel shirt, and when he turns to walk to his own truck, he kicks a loose piece of gravel across the lot, a stupid grin stuck on his face he can’t wipe off even if he tried.
