Rafe Mendez is 53, spent 28 years on wildland fire crews across the Pacific Northwest, still carries a scar snaking up his left bicep from a 2019 blaze outside Bend, and has a stubborn streak wider than the Snake River Canyon. He lost his wife Lila to ovarian cancer seven years prior, and has lived alone in his off-grid cabin 45 minutes outside Boise ever since, only coming into town every other Saturday for the farmers’ market, to pick up prescription anti-inflammatories for his fucked left shoulder, and to drop off firewood for the elderly widow down the street from his old childhood home. He’s avoided casual dates, avoided setups from Lila’s friends, avoided any situation that might require him to let someone else get close enough to see how messy the quiet parts of his life still are.
The second week of July, he spots the new mead stand tucked between the roasted chile cart and the booth selling hand-forged garden tools, and his throat goes dry. The woman running it is Elara, Lila’s cousin’s daughter, who he used to babysit when she was 8, who used to beg him to make s’mores over the backyard fire pit every Fourth of July. She’s 38 now, her dark hair streaked with sun-bleached blonde, cutoffs frayed at the hem, a faded 1998 Pearl Jam tour tee clinging to her shoulders, and she’s laughing so hard at a kid who just spilled a sample of peach mead down his shirt that her eyes crinkle at the corners. He tells himself he’s just being polite when he walks over, that he’s curious about the blackberry mead he sees stacked on the shelf, not that he’s suddenly hyper aware of how warm the 92-degree air is, how she smells like wild honey and coconut sunscreen when he gets within three feet of her booth.
They make small talk for 10 minutes, he asks about her mom’s bad knees, she asks about his shoulder that still locks up if he lifts anything over 20 pounds, he mentions he still has the crayon drawing of a fire truck she made him for his 30th birthday taped to the inside of his toolbox. When he reaches for the jar of mead she holds out to him, their hands brush for half a second, and he yanks his back like he touched a hot coal, face flushing so hot he swears his ears are turning pink. He pays, mumbles a goodbye, and practically runs to his beat-up Ford F-150, angry at himself for even noticing how soft her hand was, how long she held eye contact when she told him she’d just moved back to town after 12 years running a small farm outside Portland. He feels sick, almost, for feeling a flicker of something for someone he’s known since she was in sparkly pigtails, for betraying Lila’s memory even in a stupid, passing thought.
He comes back the next Saturday, then the one after that, telling himself he’s buying mead for his next door neighbor who loves sweet wine, that he’s just checking in to see how her stand is doing for the sake of Lila’s family. She brings him a free sample of huckleberry mead one week, mentions her 2008 Tacoma’s alternator died two nights prior, that every mechanic in town is booked three weeks out. He offers to fix it for her, no charge, just pay him in a case of that blackberry mead he likes, and he’s shocked when she says yes, asks if she can come out to his cabin the next afternoon. He spends three hours cleaning the cabin that morning, throws out the pile of old beer cans on the counter, dusts the mantel where Lila’s framed photo sits, tells himself he’s just being a good host, not trying to impress her.
She shows up right on time, carrying a paper bag of pork tamales from the Mexican place downtown that Lila used to love, and a cold can of sparkling water for him. The pine air smells sharp and sweet, crickets chirp soft in the trees lining the driveway, and his shoulder is throbbing worse than usual by the time he gets the Tacoma up on jack stands. He drops a 10mm wrench when he reaches for it, and she kneels down to grab it at the same time he does, their heads bumping softly. She laughs, and he can feel her breath warm against his neck, can see the spray of freckles across her nose he never noticed when she was a kid. When he climbs under the truck, she sits on the dirt next to the open hood, handing him tools as he asks for them, her fingers brushing his wrist every time she passes him a socket or a screwdriver.
Halfway through the job, she says she’s had a crush on him since she was 16, when he showed up to her high school graduation party, carried her drunk best friend home when no one else would, and didn’t even yell at them for sneaking beer out of his cooler. He freezes under the truck, so shocked he almost drops the alternator he’s holding. He’d spent weeks beating himself up for his stupid, inappropriate thoughts, and she’s been feeling the same way this whole time. He climbs out from under the truck, grease streaked across his forearms, sweat beading on his forehead, and she steps closer, so close he can smell the hint of mead on her breath from the sample she sipped while he worked. She reaches up, touches the thin scar on his jaw from a falling branch during the 2021 McCall fire, and he doesn’t pull away.
He finishes the alternator an hour later, tests the truck, it turns over on the first try, the engine purring smooth. She hands him the case of blackberry mead, grinning, and asks if he wants to come over to her new apartment for dinner that night, says she’s making the carnitas tacos Lila taught her to make when she was 12. He hesitates for half a second, thinks of Lila’s photo on the mantel, thinks of how long he’s been alone, how easy it feels to talk to her, how she doesn’t treat him like a broken thing that needs to be fixed. He says yes. He carries the case of mead to his porch, watches her pull out of the driveway, and for the first time in seven years, he doesn’t dread the quiet of the evening ahead.
