Ronan Hale, 62, spent 38 years perched on mountain tops as a forest fire spotter for the US Forest Service, and the only thing he hated more than crowded events was small talk. His wife Elara had died eight years prior from ovarian cancer, and he’d shut the world out somewhere between her final chemo round and the empty silence of their cabin after the funeral. The only reason he showed up to the annual Lolo National Forest volunteer fire department barbecue was because his old spotter crew had showed up on his porch at 9 a.m. with a six pack of Pabst and a threat to drag him by his work boots if he refused.
He’d camped himself at the far edge of the picnic area, back pressed to a ponderosa pine, calloused fingers wrapped around a sweating lager, when Mara sat down next to him. He’d seen her around town a handful of times, the new owner of the herbal apothecary on Main Street, mid-50s, auburn hair streaked with silver, always wearing work boots caked in mud. She set a paper plate of pulled pork and coleslaw on the splintered plastic table between them, and her denim-clad knee brushed his when she shifted to cross her legs. He tensed, like he always did when someone got too close, but didn’t move away.
“Saw you stacking fir rounds on your property last week,” she said, wiping a smudge of barbecue sauce off her chin with the back of her hand, no preamble, no dumb small talk about the weather. “Was wondering if you had extra I could buy for my herb smokehouse. All the pine around my place is too sappy, ruins the lavender bundles.”
Ronan grunted, took a sip of beer. He had three cords stacked behind his shed, more than he could burn in two winters. He had a “NO TRESPASSING NO SOLICITORS NO FAVORS” sign nailed to his front gate, and he’d turned down three separate neighbors asking for firewood in the last six months. But he found himself saying, “Got plenty. 150 a cord, delivered.”
She laughed, a low, warm sound that cut through the noise of kids yelling over cornhole and the crackle of the grill. “I saw that sign on your gate. Figured I’d have to bribe you with a free tin of my pain salve to even get a yes.” She reached across the table for the bottle of habanero hot sauce next to his elbow, and her bare forearm brushed his. He smelled cedar and orange peel, the same scent Elara used to wear in her hand cream, and his chest tightened so fast he almost choked on his beer. For a second he felt sick, like he was betraying her, even after all these years, like he had no right to notice how soft her skin was, or how the sun caught the gold flecks in her green eyes when she smiled.
He was still staring at his beer bottle when the fire chief got on the loudspeaker to announce the raffle prizes. He’d stuffed his ticket in his jeans pocket an hour earlier, forgotten all about it, until the chief called his number. The whole table of his old crew hooted, slapping the table, when the chief held up the prize: a 90 minute deep tissue massage certificate, donated by Mara’s apothecary.
Ronan froze, his face heating up, when Mara turned to him, grinning. “I do all the massages myself. I noticed you’ve been rubbing that kink in your left shoulder since you sat down. I work out knots from 30 years of packing fire hoses for fun.” She held out her hand for the crumpled ticket, and when he passed it to her, her fingers closed around his for half a beat longer than necessary. The guilt was still there, quiet in the back of his head, but it was drowned out by something softer, something he hadn’t felt in so long he almost didn’t recognize it: curiosity, want, the quiet thrill of being seen, even when he was trying his hardest to fade into the background.
“I’ll take it,” he said, before he could talk himself out of it. “But only if you let me drop off a cord of fir for free first. No charge. Call it a thank you for the massage.”
She wrote her cell number on the back of the certificate, slid it across the table to him, and tapped the number with her nail. “Deal. Text me when you’re free to bring it by. I’ll even throw in a free tin of that pain salve for after.”
He showed up at her place the next Saturday, his pickup loaded down with fir rounds, and she led him back behind her house to the smokehouse, pointing out the rows of drying lavender and sage hanging from the porch rafters. He stacked the wood for her, and when he was done, she handed him a cold glass of sweet iced tea, and a small glass jar of pine salve, the label handwritten in loopy cursive. He followed her down the tree line at the edge of her property, when she stopped to run her hand over the bark of a young fir tree, tilting her face up to the sun. The wind picked up, carrying the scent of lavender and cedar, and for the first time in eight years, he didn’t feel like he was forgetting Elara by wanting to stay, by wanting to know this woman next to him.
She turned to him, holding out a small bundle of dried sage tied with twine, and he reached out to take it, his fingers brushing hers again. A woodpecker tapped somewhere in the pines above them, and the sun filtered through the branches in dappled gold spots across her cheeks.
