Rafe Marquez is 62, retired after 31 years manning remote fire lookout towers in the Siskiyou Mountains, and he’s carried the same bad habit through all of them: he moves too fast when he’s got his hands full. That’s how he rounds the corner of the roasted chile stand at Boise’s downtown Saturday market, burlap sack of fresh hatch chiles slung over one shoulder, and slams straight into Clara Bennett. He’d only spoken to her twice before, both quick, awkward exchanges at his 10-year-old granddaughter Lila’s school events, and he’d spent the last six months quietly talking himself out of even noticing how her sundresses fit her shoulders, or how her laugh cut through the noise of the school gym during graduation. He’d convinced himself it was inappropriate, the kind of ham-fisted move a guy half his age would pull, dating his granddaughter’s art teacher. He’s got calluses so thick he can pick up a lit charcoal briquette without flinching, wears steel-toe work boots even to the market, still has a faint scar across his left cheek from a 2019 brush fire that jumped the line 100 yards from his tower. He hasn’t asked anyone out for coffee since his wife Ellen passed eight years prior, convinced anyone unused to the quiet of a fire tower would find him too gruff, too stuck in his ways, to be worth the effort.
Her glass jar of raw wildflower honey slips in her grip when they collide, sloshing over the rim to leave a thick, golden streak down the cuff of his faded gray Carhartt flannel. He freezes, half-ready to stammer out an apology, before he catches the scent of her: lavender hand cream mixed with the earthy, smoky tang of roasting chiles, the faint vanilla of the lip balm she wears. She’s laughing, not mad, swatting playfully at his upper arm like they’ve known each other for decades, not just traded three sentences over Lila’s award-winning watercolor of a fox last spring.
“I am so sorry,” she says, and she reaches for his wrist without thinking, her fingers soft where they brush the edge of the honey stain, dabbing at it with the edge of her crumpled linen napkin. Rafe’s throat goes dry. He tries to brush it off, says it’s just a flannel, he’s got 12 more just like it hanging in the closet of his bungalow, but she shakes her head, insists she owes him for ruining his shirt. “I live three blocks from here,” she says, nodding toward the tree-lined residential streets just off the market perimeter. “I’ve got a propane chile roaster on my patio, cold Modelos in the fridge, and more than enough stain remover to get that honey out before it sets. C’mon. I promise I don’t bite.”
Rafe hesitates. He’d planned to spend the afternoon alone, roasting chiles to jar for Christmas gifts, listening to old Merle Haggard records while he tinkered with the 1978 F-150 he was restoring in his driveway. But the sun is warm on the back of his neck, she’s grinning at him like she already knows he’s going to say yes, and he can’t remember the last time someone asked him to do something that didn’t involve fixing a fence or helping Lila glue googly eyes to a school project. He nods.
Her patio is strung with warm fairy lights, lined with potted succulents and tomato plants heavy with sun-ripened fruit. She fires up the roaster, and soon the air is thick with that sharp, sweet burn that makes your eyes water, makes your nose run a little. They pass a roll of paper towels back and forth, laughing when they both snort at the fumes stinging their sinuses, and she tells him she just finalized her divorce last month, that she’d seen him at Lila’s science fair back in March, kneeling on the gym floor fixing her volcano project when the baking soda wouldn’t fizz, and she’d been trying to work up the nerve to talk to him ever since.
Rafe feels the tension he didn’t know he was holding drain out of his shoulders. He’d spent so long convincing himself he was too much of a hermit, too set in his quiet routine, that anyone new would find him dull, that he’d forgotten what it felt like to be seen, really seen, not just as Lila’s grandpa or the retired fire spotter who fixed truck engines for his neighbors for free. He tells her about the towers, about the nights he’d sit on the catwalk and watch the stars so bright you could see the Milky Way stretch from horizon to horizon, no city lights to dim them, and she listens, leaning in, her knee brushing his where they sit on the weathered wooden patio steps, no awkward silences, no forced small talk.
When the chiles are done, they spread them out on a rimmed baking sheet to cool, peeling the charred black skin off with their fingers, the sticky, spicy juice sticking to their knuckles. She gets a smudge of black ash on her left cheek, right below her eye, and Rafe reaches out before he can think better of it, wiping it off with the pad of his thumb. She doesn’t pull away. She leans into his palm, her hand coming up to rest on his wrist, the same wrist she’d dabbed honey off of an hour earlier. When she tilts her chin up to kiss him, the faint sweet burn of roasted chile lingers on both their lips.
