Ronan Hale, 62, spent 34 years perched in fire lookout towers across the Sierra Nevada before he retired three years prior. His only real hobby these days was testing chili recipes and volunteering at the local fire department’s annual fundraisers. The one thing he’d avoided for eight years straight was even considering anything resembling a date, ever since his wife Mara passed from breast cancer. His grown kids kept teasing him he was turning into a hermit, and they weren’t wrong. That September afternoon, the cook-off was packed, hay bales for seating, a bluegrass band playing off to the side, the air thick with chili fumes and the sharp, sweet smell of cut alfalfa from the field next door. He was manning the beer tent, wiping down sweat from his brow with the back of his sunburnt arm, when she stepped up to the counter.
He recognized her immediately. Elara, the woman who’d bought the run-down log cabin three miles up the road from his place, the one he’d hiked past twice a month for decades, the one he’d caught himself slowing down to stare at through the trees the past six months, ever since he’d seen her hauling a stack of lumber up her porch steps in cutoff jeans and work boots, silver hair braided down her back. She was 58, he’d heard through the town grapevine, divorced, moved up from Portland to get away from the noise of the city. She leaned in over the folding table, the brim of her faded straw sunhat brushing his forehead, and he caught a whiff of pine resin from the work gloves tucked in her back pocket and vanilla lip balm, warm and soft, nothing like the lavender perfume Mara used to wear, and that tiny, stupid detail made his chest tight, half guilt, half something sharper, hungrier. “One IPA, please,” she said, and her voice was low, rough around the edges from too many years of smoking, he guessed, and her eyes were hazel, flecked with gold, and she held his gaze a full second longer than she needed to, like she was amused by how flustered he was. He fumbled the plastic cup, spilled a little beer down his wrist, and when he passed it to her, her fingers brushed his, calloused from splitting wood, he noted, and he jerked his hand back like he’d been burned.
He’d spent the past six months actively avoiding her. His kids had made jokes about asking her out for coffee, and he’d shut them down hard, half disgusted with himself for even noticing her, half scared that if he let himself talk to her, he’d be betraying Mara, like loving someone new would erase the 32 years they’d had together. It didn’t help that half the old guys at the diner kept making lewd jokes about the “new catch” up the road, that he’d heard more than one person say a guy his age had no business chasing a woman that pretty, that he should just settle for being alone the rest of his life. He’d believed them, for the most part, until she leaned against the table, took a sip of her beer, and said, “Your chili’s the one with the extra chipotle, right? I tried a bite earlier. Burned my tongue so bad I couldn’t taste anything for 10 minutes. Loved it.” He blinked, laughed, surprised. “Yeah, that’s mine. Got a little overzealous with the smoked peppers this year. Didn’t win, obviously.” She shrugged, took another sip. “Judges are cowards. Hate to see a guy take a risk.”
He didn’t see her again for the rest of the cook-off, not until the prizes were handed out, the bluegrass band packed up, most of the crowd had headed home, and he was sitting on the tailgate of his beat-up 2008 Ford F150, picking at a bowl of leftover chili, when he heard boots crunching on gravel. She was holding two slices of peach pie in paper plates, one in each hand, and she didn’t ask before she hopped up next to him on the tailgate, her thigh pressing firm against his, warm even through the denim of their jeans. “Saved you the last slice,” she said, passing him one. “Figured you earned it, working the beer tent all day.” He didn’t move away, even though every muscle in his body was screaming at him to run, to not mess this up, to not feel this way. She noticed the pale, jagged scar running up his left forearm, the one he got from a falling tree branch during the 2017 Creek Fire, and she reached out, traced the edge of it with her index finger, light, like she was handling something fragile. “How’d you get this?” she asked, and he told her, the whole story, how he’d carried two hikers out of the woods on his back, how he’d spent three days in the hospital with a concussion and a broken arm, how Mara had sat by his bed the whole time, teasing him for being an idiot. He didn’t leave any parts out, didn’t hide that he still missed her, and Elara didn’t flinch, just nodded, like she understood. “I still keep my ex-husband’s old vinyl collection,” she said, grinning. “Hated the guy, but he had great taste in Johnny Cash. Grief doesn’t have to be a box you lock yourself in, right?”
That was the thing, he realized, that no one had told him before. It wasn’t betrayal to want to feel warm next to someone else, to laugh at a bad joke, to eat peach pie off a paper plate while the sun set over the mountains. He took a bite of the pie, sweet and sticky, and then he turned to her, didn’t overthink it, didn’t second guess. “You wanna hike up to the overlook above your cabin tomorrow?” he asked. “I know a shortcut. We can bring beer and leftover chili. If you want.” She smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling, and she reached out, wiped a smudge of pie filling off his chin with her thumb, slow, deliberate, like she knew exactly what she was doing. “I’d like that,” she said, and she didn’t move her hand away from his face for a full three seconds, and for the first time in eight years, Ronan didn’t feel guilty for leaning into the touch.
