Roland Voss, 62, spent 34 years on Pacific Northwest wildland fire crews before a blown ACL and a rookie’s third-degree burn pushed him into unplanned early retirement. His biggest flaw, per his older sister’s annual Christmas card rants, is that he’d rather sleep on a bed of frost-covered pine needles than ask for a favor, or accept one, for that matter. He’d skipped the local VFW fish fry three years running, but a week of nonstop rain had kept him cooped up in his off-grid cabin, and his freezer was out of frozen pot pies, so he showed up in a grease-stained Carhartt flannel, work boots caked in mud, and grabbed the last empty seat at the far end of a scuffed folding table.
The seat next to him filled ten seconds later. He didn’t look over until her elbow brushed his when she reached for a paper plate of hushpuppies, the contact light enough that he should’ve ignored it, but he didn’t. She smelled like lemon Pledge and the fir branch wreath he’d seen hanging on the front door of the county library two weeks prior. Her name tag said Marnie, new head librarian, 58, she’d moved up from Sacramento three months prior after her 27-year marriage ended.
The VFW’s beat-up jukebox blared Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” in the background when she made a crack about the fried cod being so dry it could spark a class 3 blaze if someone held a lighter to it, and Roland almost choked on his sweet iced tea. No one joked about fire around him, not since the 2018 Columbia River Gorge fire, when he’d sent a 19-year-old rookie out to cut a secondary fire line that shifted three minutes later, leaving the kid with thick, silvery scars up both arms. He stared at her, ready to snap, until he saw the crinkle at the corner of her hazel eyes, the chipped navy nail polish on the hand she held up in mock surrender, and he laughed, a rough, rusty sound he hadn’t heard come out of his own mouth in months.
They talked for an hour, knees knocking under the table every time one of them shifted to grab more coleslaw or a crumpled paper napkin. She told him she was curating an exhibit on local wildfire history for the library’s centennial, and she’d been digging through old incident reports that had more redacted lines than usable information. She asked if he’d be willing to drive her up to some of the old burn sites, point out the spots the reports didn’t mention: the hidden meadows that grew back thicker with wildflowers after the flames, the jagged rock outcroppings crews used to shelter in when winds turned unpredictable.
Roland’s first instinct was to say no. He hadn’t driven up to the gorge burn area in four years, hadn’t wanted to see the scar on the land that matched the guilt he carried around in his chest like a pocket full of hot ash. He still had a box of his old incident logs stacked in the back of his garage, sealed shut with duct tape, that he’d never had the nerve to open. He opened his mouth to turn her down, and then she leaned a little closer, her shoulder pressing into his bicep, and he caught a hint of the peppermint lip balm she’d just swiped on. She didn’t look at him like he was the guy who’d messed up, who’d gotten a kid hurt. She looked at him like he was the only person who could give her the answers she needed.
He said yes before he could talk himself out of it. She scribbled her number on a crumpled cocktail napkin, her handwriting looping and messy, and when she handed it to him, her fingers brushed his, calloused at the tips from turning hundreds of brittle old book pages, warm through the chill of the drafty hall. He stuffed the napkin in his flannel breast pocket, his chest tight in a way that had nothing to do with the decades of wood smoke he’d breathed in on fire lines.
When he walked her to her beat-up Subaru in the parking lot, the rain had slowed to a fine, misty drizzle. She paused by her driver’s side door, tilted her head up at him, and told him she didn’t do awkward pre-meeting coffee first, that she’d rather be out in the woods with someone who knew what they were talking about than make small talk over overpriced lattes. He nodded, because he hated small talk too, hated the way it felt like treading water in a shallow pond. She leaned in and kissed his cheek, soft, quick, before she climbed in her car and pulled out of the parking lot, her windshield wipers slapping back and forth against the drizzle.
He stood there in the rain for five minutes after she left, his calloused hand pressed to the spot on his cheek where her lips had been. He pulled the napkin out of his pocket, unfolded it, and typed her number into his beat-up flip phone before the rain could smudge the blue ink. He texted her ten minutes later, when he was halfway home down the dirt road leading to his cabin, telling her he’d pick her up at 8 a.m. the next Saturday, bring extra water and a pair of spare waterproof boots in case hers weren’t thick enough for the trail. She texted back 30 seconds later, a goofy emoji of a pine tree and a tiny fire extinguisher, and he laughed again, shaking his head as he turned up his gravel driveway.
