Ronan Voss, 62, retired wildland fire spotter, had avoided every neighborhood block party for the four years he’d lived outside Reno. His flaw was a stubborn refusal to engage with small-town pleasantries, honed over 28 years spent alone in Sierra fire towers, where the only company he needed was his dispatch radio and a stack of worn western paperbacks. He’d only showed up to this one because his cattle dog, Mabel, had broken through the fence two days prior and eaten half of his neighbor’s prize peach pie, and he owed her a favor.
He leaned against the split-rail fence separating the park from the residential lots, sweating through his faded fire tower flannel even though the sun was dipping low, nursing a cheap lager he’d grabbed from the cooler by the grill. He’d meant to stay 20 minutes max, mumble an apology for the pie, then bolt back to his quiet cabin and the baseball game he had recorded. That plan went out the window when a woman carrying a mason jar of lemonade tripped over a loose fence post and slammed into his side, spilling half the drink down his left sleeve.
Her hand flew to his forearm before he could speak, dabbing at the wet fabric with a crumpled paper napkin pulled from her jeans pocket. He felt the rough calluses on her fingertips first, worn smooth from holding paintbrushes and pencil graphite for hours at a time, then the faint, warm scent of pine and rosewater clinging to her cotton t-shirt. She held eye contact longer than most people dared, no trace of the awkward pity most folks wore when they talked to the widowed ex-fire spotter who never smiled. “I am so sorry,” she said, and her voice was low, rough around the edges like she spent half her time talking to trees instead of people. “I’m Elara, Marnie’s niece. Visiting for the month to catalog alpine wildflowers for the state park service.”
Ronan grunted, the sound he usually reserved for telemarketers and nosy neighbors, but he didn’t pull his arm away. Most people in town avoided Elara, gossiped that she’d left her husband in Portland to “run wild” in the mountains, that she was too loud, too independent, too much for a quiet town. He’d heard the whispers in the general store, had rolled his eyes every time someone warned him to stay away from her. Disgust at the small-minded gossip warred with sudden, sharp desire for half a second—desire for the way she didn’t treat him like a fragile, broken thing that might shatter if someone asked him about his past.
She nodded at the thin, silvery scar cutting across his left jaw, the one he’d gotten when a lightning strike hit his tower 12 years prior, sending him tumbling 15 feet down the metal access stairs. “My dad had one just like that,” she said, leaning in a little closer when a group of rowdy teens raced past on skateboards, her shoulder pressing firm against his bicep for three slow beats. “He was a hotshot crew leader back in the 90s. Got hit by a falling branch on the Stanislaus fire.”
Ronan found himself talking before he could stop himself, telling her about the lightning strike, about the way the tower had swayed so hard he thought he’d fall straight into the pine canopy below, about the way he’d still gone back up two weeks later, stitches still in his jaw. She didn’t interrupt, didn’t make over-the-top sympathetic faces, just nodded, sipped her lemonade, asked follow-up questions that made it clear she actually cared, wasn’t just killing time with small talk. The sun sank below the mountains, painting the sky pink and tangerine, the sound of kids laughing on the slip and slide down the block fading into the hum of crickets and the distant tinkle of an ice cream truck driving out of the neighborhood.
She asked if he knew where the best patches of alpine lupine were up in the high country, the ones that only bloomed for two weeks a year right after the snowmelt. He almost said no, almost lied, almost stuck to his routine of quiet days alone with Mabel and his dispatch radio. But then he saw the faint smudge of watercolor blue on her left cheekbone, the way her silver hoop earrings caught the last of the sunset, and he said he could take her up there tomorrow, if she didn’t mind bumpy dirt roads and his terrible 90s country cassette collection.
The party had almost entirely cleared out when they walked to his beat-up 1998 Ford F-150 parked at the edge of the park. They stopped under a tall ponderosa pine, the scent of sap thick in the warm evening air. She reached up, brushed a stray pine needle off his collar, her thumb grazing the side of his neck for half a second. He felt a jolt he hadn’t felt since his wife was alive, warm and bright and a little terrifying, like the first whiff of smoke on a hot, dry summer day. “7 a.m. sharp,” she said, grinning, tucking a scrap of paper with her phone number into the pocket of his flannel. “Bring black coffee. No sugar. And warn Mabel I’m bringing extra peach pie to make up for the one she ate.”
He nodded, watched her walk back to her aunt’s house, her scuffed hiking boots kicking up little clouds of dust on the sidewalk. He drove home, Mabel waiting for him on the porch, tail thumping so hard her whole body wiggled when he pulled into the driveway. He didn’t turn on the recorded baseball game when he walked inside, didn’t tune the radio to fire dispatch like he did every single night. He pulled his scuffed hiking boots out of the back of the closet, brushed three years of dust off them, and set them by the front door next to his dented stainless steel coffee thermos.
