Rafe Mendez, 53, spent 28 years as a wildland fire crew boss before a falling cedar branch seared a four-inch jagged scar up his left forearm mid-2017, forcing his early retirement. He now runs a one-man firewood delivery and forest thinning service outside Bend, Oregon, and his biggest personality flaw is that he’s held a petty grudge against the local country club set for seven years, ever since his ex-wife left him for a golf course realtor who wore boat shoes in the snow. He avoids the west side of town on principle, only breaking the rule to drop off free oak firewood bundles for Mabel, the 78-year-old jam seller at the weekly farmers market who saves him a jar of seedless blackberry jam every Sunday, no questions asked.
It was 92 degrees that mid-July morning, the air thick with the smell of roasted sweet corn, cut peaches, and the faint, acrid tang of distant wildfire smoke drifting over the Cascades. Rafe was wearing a faded 2016 fire crew t-shirt with a hole at the elbow, work boots caked in pine duff, and a baseball cap pulled low over his sun-crinkled eyes. He’d just handed Mabel the oak bundle and stuffed his jam jar in the cooler slung over his shoulder when he turned too fast, bumping straight into a woman carrying a brown paper bag overflowing with peaches and a plastic cup of iced lavender lemonade.
The lemonade sloshed over the rim, cold and sweet, soaking the hem of her linen sundress and the front of his t-shirt. Her bare wrist grazed his scar mid-fall, and he flinched hard enough to knock one peach out of her bag onto the dust-caked asphalt. She apologized immediately, her voice soft, no entitled edge he’d come to expect from the country club wives he’d crossed paths with. He recognized her then: Elise, wife of the new country club general manager, the stuffy Seattle transplant who’d been written up in the local paper for banning food trucks from the club parking lot and yelling at the grounds crew for showing up two minutes late after a snowstorm. The guys at the feed store had been joking about her for weeks, saying she was way too pretty and way too nice to be stuck with a guy who wore tailored khakis to mow his lawn.
She knelt to grab the fallen peach, and he knelt with her, their shoulders brushing when they reached for it at the same time. She smelled like jasmine and ripe stone fruit, no heavy, cloying perfume. Her left hand was resting on the asphalt between them, the diamond on her wedding band glinting in the sun, and Rafe’s first instinct was to stand up, mumble a half-assed apology, and bolt before anyone he knew saw them talking. He didn’t move.
She asked about the scar first, running a single finger light as dandelion fluff over the raised, pink skin before she thought better of it, pulling her hand back fast like she’d touched a hot stove. He told her about the Eagle Creek fire, how he’d carried a 12-year-old hiker with a broken ankle out of the gorge when the branch fell, how he’d been more worried about the kid than the burn until the paramedics yelled at him for waiting so long to get treated. She listened, leaning in so close he could feel her breath on his arm, no polite fake interest he’d gotten used to from people who thought his job was just “chopping down trees and playing with matches.”
She told him she grew up on a dairy farm outside Yakima, spent her high school weekends mucking stalls and hauling hay bales, hated the country club’s fake cocktail parties and the women who asked her if she “missed the city” when she’d never wanted to leave eastern Washington in the first place. She said she’d been watching him at the market for three weeks, liked that he carried Mabel’s coolers to her car every Sunday without being asked, liked that he didn’t trim his beard or wear clean shirts just to fit in with the west side crowd.
Rafe knew the gossip would spread faster than a grass fire in August if anyone saw them lingering, knew the country club crowd would make up salacious stories, knew the feed store guys would razz him for months if they found out he’d even spoken to the GM’s wife. He didn’t care. He pulled a crumpled firewood receipt out of his jeans pocket, scribbled his cell number on the back in pencil, and handed it to her. She tucked it in the cup of her bra, grinning, and said she’d text him when her husband was out of town for a golf tournament the following weekend.
She picked up her bag of peaches, nodded a quiet goodbye, and walked back to her beat-up Subaru parked at the edge of the lot, her sundress blowing in the faint, warm breeze. She glanced over her shoulder twice before she opened the car door, her smile bright enough to cut through the haze. Rafe picked up the peach they’d dropped, wiped the dust off on the leg of his jeans, and took a bite, the sweet, sticky juice running down his chin.
