Ronen Voss is 62, a retired U.S. Forest Service wildfire crew lead who’s spent the last eight years living alone in a one-room cabin 22 miles outside Bend, Oregon, driving into town only once a week for propane, canned beans, and the Friday fish fry at the local VFW. His left forearm bears a thick, silvery scar from the 2018 Cascades blaze that killed two of his crew, and his biggest flaw is that he’s spent every day since his wife left him for a county administrator in 2014 deliberately shutting down any chance at connection, convinced vulnerability is just another kind of fuel for a fire you can’t put out.
He leans against the dented steel cooler by the VFW’s back wall on a mid-September Friday, beer sweating through a faded veteran’s koozie in his calloused hand, watching the room hum. Johnny Cash croons low on the jukebox, the air smells like fried cod, white vinegar, and pine drifting in from the parking lot, and most of the crowd are regulars he’s nodded at for years. The woman running the food line is new. Marisol, he heard the bartender call her, 54, a widow who moved up from Fresno six months prior to be near her granddaughter, took over the VFW’s catering contract when the old guy retired last spring. She’s wearing a faded red flannel rolled to the elbows, flour dusted on the knee of her jeans, a silver hoop earring catching the golden late-afternoon light slanting through the open roll-up door.
He waits until the line thins out to step up for a plate, keeping his eyes down like he always does, mumbles a request for extra tartar sauce. When she passes the paper plate across the folding table, her fingers brush his. He flinches so hard a tater tot slips off the edge of the plate. She snorts, swiping it up with a napkin before it hits the ground. “You’re the guy who never gets hot sauce, right? I’ve been noticing. Think you’re too tough for spice, fireman?”
He freezes. No one’s paid enough attention to his order to comment on it in four years. He mumbles something about hot sauce messing with his stomach, grabs the plate, retreats to his spot by the cooler, but he can’t stop glancing over at her. Half an hour later, a group of grade school kids who came in with their veteran grandpa go tearing past him, one slamming into his back hard enough that he stumbles forward, his left shoulder pressing solidly into her chest for half a second before he can catch himself on the edge of the table. He’s mortified, stammering an apology, face burning like he’s standing too close to a burn pile. She laughs, loud and warm, and pats his arm, her hand lingering on his bicep long enough that he can feel the heat of her palm through his worn work shirt. “Relax, I’ve had three cousins run into me harder at family barbecues. Those kids have been bouncing off walls since their mom let them stop masking in public, I swear.”
The line hits him square in the chest. He’s avoided even casual hugs from old crew buddies for three years, told himself keeping distance was safer, that the pandemic rules were just a convenient excuse to keep the wall up. But her hand is still on his arm, and he doesn’t want her to move it. He hates that part of himself, the part that’s craving contact after so long alone, thinks it’s weak, stupid, that he’s just setting himself up to get burned again. But when she says she’s got fresh peach cobbler back in the kitchen, only for people who don’t complain about her extra-crispy tater tots, and he can hang around after the fry wraps if he wants, he nods before he can talk himself out of it.
They sit on the rickety back porch of the VFW once the last guest leaves, passing a tupperware of cobbler back and forth, a half-empty bottle of sweet tea between them. The sun dips low over the Cascades, painting the sky pink and orange, the crickets starting to chirp in the grass by the steps. He tells her about the scar on his arm, about the two crew members he lost in that 2018 fire, about why he moved out to the cabin alone. She tells him about her husband, who died of COVID in 2021, about how the empty house in Fresno felt like it was eating her alive, so she packed up her baking supplies and drove north.
Her knee is pressed to his under the small plastic table, the rough fabric of her jeans rubbing against his. He reaches over without thinking, brushes a crumb of cobbler off her cheek, his thumb lingering on the soft skin of her jaw for a beat. She doesn’t pull away. She leans into the touch, just a little, and he can smell the vanilla extract on her breath, the lavender of her hand lotion.
He doesn’t say anything about dating, or moving in, or any of the big scary things he’s spent a decade running from. He just asks if she wants to go for a drive up to the viewpoint tomorrow, watch the sunset over the mountains. She says yes, grinning, and laces her fingers through his, her palm soft against the calluses on his hand. He doesn’t flinch. He squeezes back.
