Ronan O’Malley, 58, spent 22 years leading wildland fire crews across the Pacific Northwest before he traded his fire shelter for a small Christmas tree farm 45 minutes outside Bend, Oregon. He still carries the scar from the 2018 Cascadia blaze curling up his left forearm, shiny and pink at the edges, and a habit of shutting down casual overtures that don’t involve tree trimming or chainsaw maintenance, leftover from the day his wife packed her car and drove to Portland without a note seven years prior.
He’d driven into town that August afternoon to drop off a 12-foot blue spruce for the county fair’s upcoming holiday preview booth, and had been looking forward to a deep-fried Oreo for 40 minutes before he saw the handwritten sign taped to the stand’s window: TEMPORARILY CLOSED PER COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENT. He grumbled, grabbed a cold IPA from the beer garden tent instead, and hopped onto a splintered wooden stool at the far end of the counter, the rough denim of his work jeans catching on a loose screw as he sat.
The woman sat down two stools over 10 minutes later, wearing a crisp navy county polo and work boots caked in dust from the 4-H livestock barns, a tiny silver hoop glinting in her left nostril. Ronan recognized her immediately from the local news segment the night before, where she’d been labeled “the fun police” for shutting down the Oreo stand. He scowled into his beer, half ready to make a snarky comment until he noticed the way she hunched her shoulders slightly when a group of teen girls walked past muttering insults, the way she twisted the silver band on her right finger like she was used to being the bad guy.
A kid chasing a runaway cotton candy barrelled into the side of her stool 15 minutes later, and she yelped, fumbling the can of salted peanuts she’d been holding. It spilled half its contents across Ronan’s lap, and she leaned over immediately to brush them off, her warm hand brushing the top of his thigh through his jeans for half a beat longer than necessary before she pulled back, her cheeks pink. “Sorry about that,” she said, her voice lower than he expected, rough like she drank too much coffee or smoked a cigarette every now and then. She smelled like lavender hand lotion and fried dough she’d snuck from a stand that wasn’t shut down, sweet and sharp all at once.
Ronan brushed the last peanut off his lap, shook his head. “No harm done. Though I should be mad at you, I was gonna get an Oreo before you shut that stand down.”
She laughed, a sharp, genuine sound that cut through the noise of the demolition derby rumbling in the distance. “Fair. I didn’t exactly advertise the reason. A 7-year-old with a severe peanut allergy had a near miss there yesterday, their mom brought it to me. The owners refused to put up a cross-contamination sign, so I had no choice. Figured I’d take the heat over a kid ending up in the ER.”
Ronan blinked, his annoyance melting fast. He hated when people made snap judgments about him for his gruff demeanor and scar, and he’d just done the exact same thing to her. He nodded, pushed the extra bag of peanuts he’d grabbed earlier across the counter to her. “Fair play. I’m Ronan, I run the tree farm out past Tumalo.”
She told him her name was Maeve, she’d moved to Bend six months prior from Seattle, took the health inspector job after 10 years working in pediatric emergency rooms. They talked for an hour, the beer garden crowd thinning out as the sun dipped low over the Cascades, painting the sky pink and orange. She kept glancing at his scar, and when he asked what she was staring at, she leaned in slightly, her knee brushing his under the counter, and said “I’ve seen a lot of scars. Most are from bad luck. Yours looks like it’s from doing something good.”
He offered her a ride to her car, parked on the far edge of the fairgrounds, and they ended up sitting on the tailgate of his beat-up 2008 F-150, sharing the mini pecan pie he’d stashed in his cooler for his niece. She reached out without asking, traced the edge of his scar with her index finger, her nail just barely scratching the sensitive skin at the edge, and he didn’t pull away. The Ferris wheel music drifted over from the main fairground, soft and tinny, and the air smelled like cut grass and alfalfa from the hay bales stacked near the parking lot. When she leaned in to kiss him, he tasted beer and pecan pie on her tongue, slow and unrushed, nothing like the awkward first dates he’d bailed on half a dozen times over the last seven years.
She pulled away after a minute, fished a pen out of her polo pocket, scribbled her cell number on the back of her health inspector business card, and pressed it into his palm. “Call me when you set up your tree lot the week after Thanksgiving. I’ll bring spiked hot cocoa. And I promise I won’t shut it down for any made-up violations.”
He laughed, tucked the card into the inside pocket of his flannel shirt, where it wouldn’t get crumpled. He watched her climb into her silver county SUV, wave out the window before she pulled out of the parking lot, the sound of her tires crunching over the gravel fading into the distance. He popped the last bite of pecan pie into his mouth, leaned back against the truck’s cab, and didn’t even mind that he’d never gotten that deep-fried Oreo.
