Elroy Voss, 62, had spent most of the last eight years avoiding Bozeman’s annual fall beer and cider festival. The retired smokejumper, who now ran a small backcountry firewood delivery service, hated the forced small talk, the guys from his old crew badgering him to go on blind dates with widows from the local Lutheran church, the way everyone in town seemed to have an opinion on how he should spend his time since his wife passed. He’d only showed up this year because his kid sister had begged him to help haul kegs for the cider tent, and he’d planned to slip out the second the last crate was unloaded.
He was leaning against a splintered oak post at the far edge of the tent, sipping a spiced hard cider he’d grabbed as a tip, when he spotted her. Lila Marquez, 38, the park ranger who lived three cabins down from his place off Hyalite Canyon Road, was weaving through the crowd, her forest service uniform shirt tied around her waist, cutoff jeans showing a faint bruise on her left thigh from a fallen log she’d moved earlier that day, pine sap smudged along the edge of her jaw. He’d known her for six years, had helped her pull her truck out of a snowbank last winter, had traded her a cord of fir for a bag of wild huckleberries she’d foraged the summer before, had always told himself she was off-limits—younger, recently separated, the kind of woman the whole town watched like a hawk after her husband left her for a bartender from Livingston a month prior.
She spotted him before he could duck behind the post, waved, and cut across the grass toward him, boots kicking up dust dotted with fallen golden aspen leaves. The bluegrass band playing the main stage was cranked loud enough that she had to lean in to say hello, her shoulder brushing the sunburned skin of his forearm where his flannel sleeves were rolled up. He caught a whiff of pine, lavender lip balm, and the faint, tart scent of the blackberry cider she was holding, and his throat went dry. He’d not been that close to a woman who wasn’t related to him in almost a decade.
They chatted for twenty minutes, first about the sudden cold snap that had hit the valley the week before, then about the black bear that had been raiding campsites up the canyon, then about the way his old smokejumper crew was already three sheets to the wind over by the beer tent, yelling at each other about a fire they’d fought in 2019. When she laughed at his dumb story about the bear stealing his chainsaw off his truck bed two weeks prior, she tipped her head back, and he couldn’t stop staring at the freckles scattered across her collarbone. Half his brain was screaming that everyone within a ten foot radius was watching them, that the gossip mill would be running hot by Sunday brunch, that he was betraying his wife’s memory even letting himself notice how pretty Lila was when she laughed. The other half was hyper aware of every time her knee brushed his when she shifted her weight, every time her eyes darted down to his mouth before she looked away.
When she mentioned she was camping up the canyon that weekend, that the same bear had ripped a three inch gash in the side of her tent the night before, he offered his heavy duty canvas repair kit before he could talk himself out of it. She didn’t take the offer of the kit alone, though. She asked him to come up with her, help her patch it, cook hot dogs over her campfire, since she didn’t have anyone else to go with. He hesitated for three full seconds, then nodded.
The drive up the canyon was quiet, her pickup following his rusted Ford F-150, the sun dipping low over the peaks, painting the sky pink and tangerine. He patched the tent in ten minutes, his fingers calloused from decades of handling ropes and axes, and when she handed him a roll of waterproof tape, their fingers brushed for three long beats. She didn’t pull away. He looked up, and she was staring at his mouth, not his eyes, her cheeks pink from the cold and the cider.
She told him she’d had a crush on him for three years, had waited to say anything until she was officially separated, had thought he was too wrapped up in his grief to notice her anyway. He told her he’d thought about her too, had been scared of what everyone would say, scared he was too old, too broken, too set in his ways to let someone new in. She leaned in then, kissed him slow, her hand resting on the thick, silvery scar on his forearm he’d gotten from a 2017 fire outside Missoula, and he kissed her back, the campfire popping behind them, a loon calling across the reservoir.
They didn’t rush anything. They cooked the hot dogs, ate them off paper plates, sat on the tailgate of his truck and watched the stars come out, her shoulder pressed to his the whole time. He stayed the night, slow and quiet, no loud declarations, no promises he couldn’t keep. The next morning, they drove back into town, stopped at the tiny diner on Main Street for pancakes, and when Mabel, the waitress who’d worked there since 1992, winked at them as she set down their coffee, he didn’t look away. He just squeezed Lila’s hand where it rested on the booth between them, warm and calloused from handling trail tools. When she leaned over to steal a bite of his blueberry pancake, he didn’t tease her, just held the plate a little closer so she didn’t have to reach.
