Rafe Marquez, 62, spent 28 years on a federal hotshot firefighting crew before retiring to run a small firewood delivery outfit out of his one-room cabin west of Missoula, Montana. His biggest flaw, if you asked his 16-year-old granddaughter who’d dragged him to the local fire department’s annual chili cookoff that crisp September afternoon, was that he’d turned avoiding people into an art form ever since his wife Elaine died of breast cancer eight years prior. He’d skipped every community event, ignored every neighbor’s dinner invitation, even lied about not being home when the county librarian had knocked on his door a month prior to nag him about 12 overdue Louis L’Amour paperbacks he’d checked out three years earlier, when a snowstorm had knocked out his internet for 10 days. He’d brought those books with him on fire shifts for years, the spines frayed, pages stained with coffee and campfire ash, and he’d forgotten he’d even taken them out until he’d seen her standing on his porch, braid slung over her shoulder, holding a bright pink late fee notice.
He was standing by the folding table stacked with paper bowls of chili, picking at the edge of his frayed hotshot crew flannel, the burn of extra spicy habanero lingering on his tongue, when he smelled it: cinnamon and old paper, sharp and warm, cutting through the haze of smoked pork and chili powder hanging over the fairground lot. He turned, and there she was, the librarian, standing so close their elbows brushed when she reached for a cornbread muffin off the tray next to his bowl. Her name tag read “Marnie”, she had streaks of silver threaded through the chestnut braid slung over her shoulder, faint freckles across her nose, and when she looked up at him, the corner of her mouth tugged up in a smirk that made his neck go hot, like he’d stood too close to a burn pile on a windy day.
“Fancy running into you here, Marquez,” she said, wiping a crumb of cornbread off her cream knit sweater, the fabric soft and fuzzy where it brushed his bare wrist. “I left three notes under your truck windshield wiper last week. Figured you were either hiding out in the woods or dead.” He grunted, shifting his weight, the pine sap caked on his work boots cracking as he moved. He’d meant to lie, say he’d donated those books to a thrift store, but the words died in his throat when she leaned in a little further, her eyes bright with amusement, and he could hear the quiet lilt in her voice, like she wasn’t actually mad about the late fees, just amused that he’d gone to such lengths to avoid her.
The thought of spending more time around anyone, let alone a librarian who’d have him sitting still in a quiet room for hours, made his skin crawl at first. He’d spent the better part of a decade only talking to people long enough to hand them a receipt for a cord of oak, hadn’t sat through a full conversation with someone who wasn’t his granddaughter in years. But then she mentioned the books, how the county was talking about cutting funding for the adult literacy program she ran out of the library’s basement, how most of the guys in the program loved westerns, couldn’t get enough of the lone cowboy narratives that felt familiar to the rough, transient lives most of them had lived. He thought of Elaine, the last six months of her life, when she’d been too tired to hold a book, how he’d read those same Louis L’Amour paperbacks out loud to her every night before she fell asleep, his voice rough from yelling over fire radios all day, but she’d said it was her favorite sound in the world.
She dropped a napkin on the dirt at his feet, and when they both bent to grab it, their foreheads bumped softly, and he laughed, a rough, rusty sound he hadn’t heard come out of his own mouth in years. “Look,” she said, rubbing the spot on her forehead where they’d hit, her fingers brushing his when she took the napkin from him, the contact sending a faint jolt up his arm like the shock he used to get grabbing a hot hose coupling without gloves, “I’ll waive the $72 in late fees. All you have to do is bring the books back, and come in four hours a week to read to the guys, or help them sound out the words they don’t know. I’ll even buy you a draft of that dark ale you like from the bar on Higgins after your first shift. I saw you drinking it there last month, when you dropped off wood for the owner.”
He hesitated for half a second, the old instinct to say no, to climb back in his beat-up 2005 Ford pickup and drive straight to his cabin, to lock the door and ignore the world for another week, tugging at him. But then she tilted her head, and looked at him like she could see past the scar across his left cheek from a falling tree branch on a 2017 fire, past the pine sap on his boots, past the thick wall he’d built around himself after Elaine died, and he nodded before he could think better of it.
They finished their chili standing next to the table, her shoulder pressed lightly to his as they watched his granddaughter win first place in the junior fire hose relay, the siren on the old fire truck blaring as she crossed the finish line. When they walked across the fairground parking lot to head to the bar, the dry pine needles crunching under their boots, she slipped her hand into the crook of his arm, and he didn’t pull away. The sun was dipping below the Bitterroot Mountains, painting the sky streaks of pink and tangerine, and the cold September air nipped at his ears, but he didn’t feel like rushing.
He held the bar door open for her, and the smell of fried pickles and beer wrapped around them as they stepped inside.
