Rafe Mendoza is 62, retired forest fire spotter, spent 31 years climbing 100-foot steel towers in the Willamette National Forest, now lives off-grid 20 minutes outside Bend, Oregon. His biggest flaw is he’s turned down every dinner invitation, every set-up, every casual offer of company from neighbors and old coworkers for the last 8 years, ever since his wife Lila died from smoke inhalation when the 2015 Blue River Fire swept through their old property. He only leaves the cabin two nights a week: Wednesdays for grocery runs, Fridays for the VFW post’s all-you-can-eat fish fry, where he sits at the same wobbly corner table, eats two pieces of beer-battered cod, and doesn’t speak to anyone unless he absolutely has to.
That Friday, the post is louder than usual. The county just passed its new public gathering smoking ban three days prior, and every guy in the room is complaining about it between bites of coleslaw, bitching that the government’s got no business telling them where they can light up after a long week. Rafe doesn’t care much either way—he only smokes two Camels a day, usually out on his cabin porch where no one’s around to bother him. He’s wiping crumbs off his faded gray flannel when he sees her walk in.
She’s in a scuffed pair of steel-toe work boots, a soft navy blazer over a faded Willie Nelson t-shirt, a metal clipboard tucked under one arm, a thin scar slicing through her left eyebrow. He recognizes the county health department logo stitched on her blazer pocket, figures she’s here to do a surprise inspection of the fryers, half expects her to shut the whole operation down by the end of the night. She makes the rounds for 20 minutes, nods at the guy manning the fry station, scribbles notes on her clipboard, then heads straight for Rafe’s table.
He tenses up immediately, already ready to tell her he’s got nothing to do with the food service, just a paying customer. She stops a foot away, leans in just enough that he can smell lemon dish soap and pine on her, no heavy perfume, no overwhelming scented lotion, nothing that makes his nose twitch the way it used to when Lila’s sister would wear too much vanilla extract to family dinners. “You got a light?” she says, nodding at the half pack of Camels sticking out of his flannel pocket. “New ban means I can’t light up in the parking lot, and I’ve been running inspections since 6 a.m. I’m this close to chewing through my clipboard.”
Rafe stares at her for three full seconds, no one’s approached him at the VFW unprompted in three years. He stands up without saying a word, tucks his hands in his jeans pockets, nods toward the back door leading to the overgrown dirt trail that cuts through the woods behind the post, land that’s owned by the forest service, not the county, not part of the VFW’s event permit. She follows him out, the door slamming shut behind them, cutting off the sound of the jukebox playing Johnny Cash.
The wind off the Cascades is sharp enough to make his eyes water. They step off the trail a few feet, huddle behind a thick Douglas fir to get out of the gusts, their shoulders bumping when she shifts her weight to pull a menthol out of her own blazer pocket. He pulls his Zippo out, flicks it open, holds it out for her. When she leans in to light the cigarette, her hair falls in her face, their fingers brush when she reaches to hold the flame steady. Her hands are ice cold, calloused at the knuckles, like she spends a lot of time hauling things around, not just sitting at a desk.
He lights his own Camel, doesn’t say anything at first. He’s half disgusted with himself for even being out here, for letting a stranger distract him, for the stupid little jolt he felt when their fingers touched. He’d spent 8 years convincing himself he was done with any kind of connection, that letting anyone get close would be betraying Lila, that he was better off alone with his fire lookout logs and his apple tree and his old pickup. “I’m Clara,” she says, blowing smoke off to the side, not in his face, which he appreciates. She doesn’t look away when he tells her his name, when he mentions he used to be a fire spotter, when he offhandedly says he quit full time after the 2015 fire took his house and his wife.
Most people get awkward when he mentions Lila, stumble over apologies, change the subject fast. Clara just nods, takes another drag of her cigarette, says her first husband died in a logging accident outside Eugene when she was 32, she never bothered getting remarried, got the health inspector job after working as a paramedic for 15 years, the scar on her eyebrow is from a drunk guy who punched her at a bar call back in 2009. They stand close enough that their arms brush every time one of them shifts, the wind whistling through the fir branches, the smell of pine and cigarette smoke wrapping around them. When a pine needle sticks to the collar of his flannel, she reaches up to pluck it off, her thumb brushing the edge of his jaw by accident, and he doesn’t flinch—something he’s done every time someone’s touched him for the last 8 years.
She laughs when he admits he bakes an apple pie every Sunday, uses apples from the tree he planted in his yard the year Lila died. She teases him that she’s a health inspector, so she’d have to do a full inspection of his kitchen if he ever offered her a slice. He doesn’t even think before he says she can come back to his place tonight, he’s got half a pie left in the fridge, fresh coffee, no pressure, they don’t even have to talk if she doesn’t want to.
She pauses for a second, holds his gaze, that little half smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, then nods. He drops his cigarette butt, grinds it into the dirt with the toe of his scuffed work boot, leads her back toward the parking lot, the crunch of gravel under their feet loud enough to drown out the distant sound of the VFW’s jukebox. He opens the passenger door of his beat up 2008 Ford F150 for her, brushes a dead pine needle off the cracked vinyl seat before she climbs in, the faint smell of his homemade apple pie that he’d left in the cab to stay warm drifting between them. She tosses her half-finished menthol into the overflowing ashtray, leans her head back against the frayed cloth headrest, and says she hasn’t had homemade pie that wasn’t from a grocery store bakery in 12 years.
