Rafe Sorenson, 62, spent 32 years perched in a 70-foot fire tower in the eastern Sierras, scanning the treeline for wispy plumes of smoke before they bloomed into infernos. He retired three years after his wife Elara died of ovarian cancer, moved into a one-room cabin ten miles outside Bend, and had spoken more than ten sentences to another person maybe a dozen times since. His biggest flaw, if you asked the few people who still knew him, was that he’d convinced himself any spark of joy after Elara’s death was a betrayal, so he snuffed out every small possibility before it could catch.
The annual Bend chili cookoff was the only community event he forced himself to attend every year, mostly because the fire department’s booth made the same beef and bean chili Elara used to enter back when they first moved to Oregon. He was leaning against a splintered wooden post by the beer tent, blowing on a too-hot spoonful, when someone’s shoulder slammed into his side. A splash of citrusy hard seltzer soaked the cuff of his faded red flannel.
He looked up ready to grumble, and froze. Lila Marlow, Elara’s second cousin, 58, was holding an empty seltzer can, her free hand clamped over her mouth, eyes wide. He hadn’t seen her since Elara’s funeral, when she’d hugged him and slipped a handwritten note with her number into his pocket that he’d thrown away two days later, too raw to even read it. She was thinner now, her dark hair streaked with gray pulled back in a messy braid, a thin scar snaking above her left eyebrow from the time she’d tripped over a root on a group hike they’d taken in 2012, her nail polish chipped the same pale blue Elara used to wear every summer.
She apologized so fast her words ran together, reaching out to pat the wet spot on his sleeve, her knuckles brushing his forearm for half a second. The contact sent a jolt up his arm he hadn’t felt in years. He mumbled that it was fine, the flannel was already stained with chain oil and pine sap anyway, and she laughed, a loud, throaty sound that cut through the noise of kids screaming chasing a golden retriever past the booths.
He didn’t mean to stay and talk. He’d planned to eat his chili, grab a six pack to go, and drive back to the cabin before the sun dipped low. But she mentioned she’d just moved back to town to take over her mom’s used bookstore on Wall Street, that she’d found a box of Elara’s old hiking boots in the attic, still caked with mud from the last trip they’d taken to Mount Bachelor, and he found himself following her to an empty picnic table off to the side of the crowd.
They sat close enough that their knees brushed every time someone squeezed past the narrow gap between tables. She leaned in when he told a dumb story about the time a raccoon snuck into his fire tower and ate half his supply of jerky, her shoulder pressing into his bicep, her hair smelling like lavender and pine. He kept waiting for the familiar twist of guilt in his gut, the voice in his head telling him he had no right to be laughing, no right to be noticing how the late afternoon sun hit her hazel eyes and turned them gold. It didn’t come. Instead, he found himself telling her about the nights he’d sat in the tower after Elara got sick, talking to her on the satellite phone, counting the days until he could come home.
She reached across the table then, her palm resting on top of his, her hand calloused from hauling boxes of books, her thumb brushing the scar on his knuckle he’d gotten when he’d fallen off a ladder fixing the tower’s antenna. “No one’s asking you to forget her, you know,” she said, quiet enough only he could hear, over the twang of the guitar and the roar of the crowd. “She’d kick your ass if she saw how holed up you’ve been.”
He didn’t pull his hand away. For the first time in eight years, he didn’t feel like he was doing something wrong. He didn’t feel like he was letting Elara down. He just felt warm, like the first sun on his face after a long, cold winter in the mountains.
They agreed to meet for coffee the next morning at the little shop down the street from her bookstore, she scribbled her number on a crumpled receipt from the bookstore, pressed it into his palm. He walked her to her beat up Subaru parked at the edge of the field, she hugged him before she climbed in, her arms tight around his waist, her head resting on his chest for a beat longer than necessary. He hugged her back, no hesitation.
He tucks the crumpled receipt into the front pocket of his flannel, pauses to grab the cold beer he’d left on the picnic table, and smiles for the first time in months without the familiar sharp stab of guilt following right after.
