Ronan Voss, 62, spent 28 years manning a fire lookout tower in the northern Sierras before his knees gave out and his wife’s final request to be closer to their niece’s family pushed him to a small bungalow outside Boise last year. His biggest personality flaw? He’s spent the eight years since Ellie’s death treating any unplanned social interaction like a wildfire he can contain by turning on his heel and walking the other way. Most days he only talks to his 10-year-old coonhound, Mabel, who’s deaf in one ear and doesn’t argue with his rule that the only music allowed in the house is 70s folk and old bluegrass.
He ducks into McGee’s, the dive bar on the edge of town, on a rain-slick Tuesday just to get out of the downpour and grab his usual bourbon neat, not knowing the bar is hosting a trivia night benefitting local wildfire relief efforts. The host, a kid half his age with a neon flannel and a nose ring, spots him before he can slip out the back, grabs his elbow, and yanks him toward the only half-full table in the room, saying they’re short one player and the top prize pays out a $50 bar tab. He’s ready to snap a refusal until he slides into the empty booth and his knee brushes the knee of the woman sitting next to him.
She’s 58, he’d guess, with streaks of silver in her dark braid and a thin, pale scar slicing across her left knuckle. She smells like pine soap and cherry lip balm, and when she laughs at the kid’s terrible joke about matchsticks, her voice is rough around the edges, like she still sneaks a Camel every now and then when no one’s looking. “Ignore Javi,” she says, tilting her head up to meet his eye, and he can’t look away, not when her irises are the exact shade of burnt amber he’d watched spread across tree lines in the worst fire seasons. “He’s been grabbing every single person who walks through the door for the last 20 minutes. You can leave if you want, no hard feelings. But we could use someone who knows anything about wildfire facts, since half our team can’t tell a controlled burn from a campfire left unattended.”
He stays. He doesn’t know why, at first. He’s half-convinced he’s losing his mind, that he should be home on his couch with Mabel and a frozen pizza instead of sitting in a booth full of strangers answering trivia questions. But every time their elbows brush when they reach for the plate of cheese curds in the middle of the table, a tingle runs up his arm that he hasn’t felt since Ellie was alive, and he’s torn between leaning in and yanking away so fast he knocks over his bourbon. He feels guilty, stupid, like he’s cheating on a promise he made to a woman who’s been gone almost a decade, but he can’t bring himself to stand up. She teases him when he gets three wildfire-related questions in a row right, says she recognizes his last name from incident reports she read back when she was a wildland firefighter in Oregon in the 90s, and he freezes, because no one in this town knows that part of his life, no one’s asked.
By the final round, their team is tied for first, and she’s leaning in so close to whisper a guess about 70s folk album art that her breath is warm against his ear, and he has to focus so hard on not shivering he almost forgets the answer. They win. Javi slaps two tickets to the upcoming folk festival in town down on the table along with the bar tab voucher, and she picks them up, twists them between her fingers for a second before she turns to him, that small, lopsided smile on her face. “I was gonna give these away if we won,” she says, and her knee presses against his under the table, intentional this time, not an accident. “But I heard you mumble the lyrics to that John Prine track when it played on the jukebox 20 minutes ago. You got plans the second Saturday of next month?”
He doesn’t make an excuse. He doesn’t say he doesn’t go to events, doesn’t say he doesn’t spend time with people he doesn’t know, doesn’t say he’s spent eight years hiding from anything that might make him feel like he’s living instead of just existing. He says no, he doesn’t have plans.
They sit at the bar for another two hours after the trivia crowd clears, talking about fire lines that got too close, about the three senior dogs she fosters out of her cottage on the edge of town, about Mabel’s habit of stealing socks off the laundry line. When he walks her to her beat-up pickup truck in the parking lot, the rain still tapping against the asphalt, she squeezes his hand before she climbs in, says she’ll text him the details for the festival first thing tomorrow.
He drives home slow, the concert ticket stub tucked in the breast pocket of his worn wool flannel, the bourbon warm in his chest. Mabel greets him at the door when he walks in, tail thumping against the wall, and he kneels down to scratch behind her ears, the ghost of that cherry lip balm scent still clinging to the cuff of his shirt.
