Rafe Novak, 59, spent 27 years as a smokejumper for the US Forest Service, leaping out of planes into wildfires across the West before a blown knee forced his retirement four years prior. He’s stubborn to a fault, still sleeps on the same thin cot he brought home from base camp, and hasn’t let anyone stay at his cabin 10 miles outside Red Lodge, Montana, since his wife left him for a Bozeman realtor 12 years ago. The only time he’s around crowds is the annual fire department chili cookoff, where he’s won first place for his smoked elk chili three years running.
Late October air nips at his cheeks as he wipes down the Formica counter of his booth, steam curling off the 10-gallon pot of chili next to him, the air thick with the scent of chipotle, roasted garlic, and pine burning in the fire pits strung along the town square. A group of elementary school kids scream as they chase each other through a pile of golden aspen leaves, and he smirks when one trips over a hay bale and pops right back up, covered in crumbs from a caramel apple.
He’s halfway through handing a bowl of chili to the local hardware store owner when she walks up. Mara Hale, the new county librarian, the woman half the town has been gossiping about since she moved here three months ago, the one who put up a display of queer memoirs in the library entryway and told the protesting church group to “either check a book out or get off the property.” Rafe had listened to the guys at the fire station joke that she was a stuck-up city liberal who’d run back to Portland by Christmas, and he’d nodded along, not bothering to ask questions.
She’s wearing a thick forest green knit sweater, jeans scuffed at the knees, and work boots caked in mud, no fancy coat, no overpriced lattes in her hand like the gossip said she carried everywhere. She leans against the edge of his booth, her shoulder a scant three inches from his bicep, and nods at the chili pot. “Heard yours is the only one here that doesn’t taste like canned tomato sauce and regret,” she says, and her voice is lower than he expected, warm, like she’s laughing at a joke only the two of them know.
He grunts, ladles a bowl for her, slides it across the counter with a chunk of cornbread. He watches her take a bite, her eyes fluttering shut for half a second, and he feels a weird flutter in his chest he hasn’t felt in years. “You smoked the elk over ponderosa, right?” she says, wiping a smudge of chili off her chin with the back of her hand. “Tastes like the fire we had in our backyard when I lived in eastern Oregon, before I moved to Portland.”
He blinks, surprised. No one ever picks up on the ponderosa part. They talk for 20 minutes, her leaning further into the booth as they go, their elbows brushing every time she reaches for a napkin or he stirs the chili pot. He smells pine shampoo and cinnamon gum on her, notices the ink stains on her fingers from stamping library books, the tiny scar across her left eyebrow from a bike crash when she was 16, she tells him. She teases him about the “World’s Okayest Smokejumper” sticker on his beat up thermos, and he laughs, a loud, rough laugh he hasn’t pulled out since his last season jumping fires.
A gust of wind picks up out of nowhere, blowing her knit hat off her head and onto the ground between their feet. They both bend down to grab it at the same time, his calloused hand covering hers for three full seconds before he pulls back, his skin tingling where they touched. Her palm is soft, but has a hard callus on her index finger from holding pens for hours at a time, he notices. He hands her the hat, and she holds eye contact with him, hazel eyes flecked with gold, for so long his ears go pink.
He admits he bought into all the town gossip about her, that he thought she was a stuck up troublemaker who didn’t belong here. She snorts, admits she heard he was a grumpy hermit who hadn’t spoken to a new person in a decade. They both laugh, and she tucks a strand of chestnut hair behind her ear before she speaks again. “The cookoff ends in an hour,” she says, nodding at the dive bar two blocks down. “Wanna get a beer after? I’ve been dying to hear about the time you jumped that fire in the Bitterroots the guy at the gas station told me about.”
He hesitates for half a second, the old instinct to make an excuse, to say he has to get back to the cabin, to shut himself off again, rising up fast. Then he looks at her, grinning, her boot brushing his under the edge of the booth, and he nods.
They’re sitting in a booth at the bar an hour later, Johnny Cash playing low on the jukebox, frosty mugs of beer sitting between them. She’s leaning in, her chin propped on her hand, hanging on every word as he tells her about the 2018 Bitterroot fire, the time he got stuck in a tree for two hours waiting for a rescue crew. He lifts his beer to clink hers, and for the first time in 12 years, he doesn’t make an excuse to leave early.
