Roman Voss, 58, spent 32 years as a Yellowstone backcountry ranger before he retired two years prior, and he’d rather face a charging grizzly with nothing but a bear spray canister than work a room full of chatty small-town strangers. His only flaw, the one his late wife Karen used to nag him about until the day she died of ovarian cancer six years back, was that he’d rather hole up in his log cabin three miles outside of town fixing his old fly rods than make any new connections. He’d only shown up to the Red Lodge fire department’s annual chili cookoff because his old patrol partner Jim showed up on his porch at 2 PM with a six pack of PBR and threatened to drag him there by his scuffed work boots if he didn’t come voluntarily.
He was leaning against a splintered oak folding table on the far edge of the fairgrounds, half a bowl of way-too-spicy habanero chili in one hand and a half-empty beer in the other, when Elara Mendez bumped his elbow. She was 54, the town’s new librarian who’d moved up from Santa Fe three months prior, and she’d been laughing so hard at the fire chief’s story about rescuing a cat stuck in a pine tree that she hadn’t been looking where she was going. A dollop of her turkey chili splattered onto the toe of Roman’s boot, caked already with mud from the hiking trail he’d walked that morning. She yelped an apology, swiping at the mess with the crumpled napkin in her hand before she even thought about it, and Roman had to bite back a laugh at how flustered she looked, strands of dark hair streaked with silver sticking to her forehead where the late August sun had made her sweat.
He told her not to worry about it, listing off the far worse things that had ended up on those boots over the years: bear slobber, moose urine, pine sap so thick he’d had to scrape it off with a pocket knife, even a half-melted s’more that a kid had dropped on them during a park tour. She laughed, loud and bright, cutting through the hum of chatter and the crackle of the bonfire at the center of the grounds, and the sound hit him somewhere in the chest he’d thought was closed off for good. She was wearing a faded blue flannel over a flowy yellow sundress, scuffed work boots on her feet caked with the same kind of mud as his, and when she leaned in closer to ask if he was the same Roman Voss who’d written the backcountry patrol reports the local historical society had donated to the library a month prior, he could smell lavender lotion mixed with the cumin and smoke clinging to her clothes.
He nodded, surprised. No one had ever asked about those reports before, not even Karen, who’d listened to his stories but had never cared to read the dry, official write-ups he’d typed up after every shift. Elara told him she’d spent three nights reading through them, that her favorite was the one from 2017 where he’d rescued a wolf pup stuck in an illegal leg trap, carried it three miles back to the ranger station in his jacket, and stayed up all night feeding it warm broth until the wildlife vet could get there. She said she’d cried at the part where he wrote that the pup had nipped his finger before it was released, like it was saying thank you. Roman felt his ears go pink, something he hadn’t experienced since he was a teenager asking a girl to prom, and when their hands brushed as she handed him a fresh napkin to wipe the chili stain off the front of his own flannel, he felt a jolt run up his arm that had nothing to do with the cold beer he’d been drinking.
For half a second he wanted to step back, to make an excuse about needing to get home to his old hound dog, to shut this whole thing down before it got started. He’d spent six years telling himself that any kind of new connection, any flicker of interest in another woman, was a betrayal of Karen, that he was too old for this kind of stupid crush anyway, that it would only end in heartbreak. But then Elara leaned in a little more, her shoulder only six inches from his, and told him she’d tracked down a first edition of *The Grizzly Bear’s Year*, the book he’d read so many times as a kid that his copy had fallen apart at the spine, and she was holding it for him at the library. She asked if he wanted to come by next Saturday to pick it up, maybe stay for the wildlife author talk she was hosting that afternoon, and he almost said no, almost lied that he had plans to fix his roof, almost walked away.
The fire department’s siren blared then, loud enough to make his ears ring, announcing the winner of the chili contest, and they both had to lean in even closer to hear each other, their foreheads almost touching for half a second. He could see the faint freckles across her nose, the tiny laugh lines around her dark brown eyes, and he said yes before he could overthink it. She grinned, pulling a crumpled scrap of paper out of her pocket and scribbling her cell number on it, pressing it into his palm so her fingers lingered on his for a beat longer than necessary.
By the time the cookoff wrapped up, the sun had gone down completely, the air turning crisp enough that he could see his breath when he exhaled. He walked her to her beat-up green Subaru, the back window plastered with wolf rescue and library fundraiser stickers, and she handed him a crumpled paper bag that was still warm through the paper. She said it was cornbread she’d baked that morning, a peace offering for spilling chili on his boot, and a down payment on all the old patrol stories he’d promised to tell her when he came by the library.
He sat in his own truck for ten minutes after she drove off, holding the warm paper bag in his lap, the scrap of paper with her number folded carefully in his flannel pocket. The old guilt he’d expected to feel, the voice in his head telling him he was doing something wrong, never showed up. He turned the key in the ignition, the radio cutting on to an old Johnny Cash song he and Karen used to dance to in the kitchen on Saturday nights, and pulled out of the fairgrounds parking lot, already mentally sorting through the box of old patrol photos he kept in his attic to bring with him next Saturday.
