Cole Hargrove, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service wildfire crew lead, had dragged himself to the Saturday farmers market only because his elderly next door neighbor had begged him for huckleberry jam, said the stuff at the grocery store tasted like sugary cardboard. He’d worked 22 years chasing blazes across the west, had a scar splitting his left eyebrow and a bad knee that ached when the humidity spiked, and his biggest flaw was that he’d refused to let anyone get close to him since his wife Claire died of ovarian cancer seven years prior. He’d moved to this tiny Montana mountain town two years ago, lived in the off-grid cabin he’d built with his own two hands, spent most days fixing old logging equipment or hiking the back trails, and the closest he got to casual conversation was yelling over the jukebox at the VFW on Friday nights.
The sun beat down on the back of his neck, his faded flannel sticking to his shoulders, when he spotted the jam stand at the far end of the market. He was squinting at the handwritten labels, reaching for a sample spoon, when a woman’s arm brushed his, warm and solid through the thin cotton of his sleeve. He smelled coconut sunscreen and pine resin, sharp and sweet, before he looked up.
It was Lila. Claire’s half-sister, the kid who’d crashed their camping trips when she was 19, who’d gotten drunk on cheap beer at their wedding and tried to serenade them with a terrible rendition of Sweet Caroline. He hadn’t seen her in 12 years, not since she’d moved to Alaska to work on a fishing boat, and for a second he thought about turning and walking away, his throat tight with a weird mix of guilt and something he didn’t want to name.
She recognized him first, her hazel eyes widening before she grinned, the laugh lines around her mouth crinkling. There was a thick streak of silver in her auburn braid, slung over one shoulder, and she was wearing a faded pearl snap shirt that he’d swear used to hang in Claire’s closet. “Cole Hargrove. I’d know that beat up Stetson a mile away. You still wear that thing even when it’s 80 degrees out?”
He laughed, surprised, the tension in his shoulders loosening a little. “Sun gives me migraines. You’re the last person I expected to see selling jam in the middle of Montana.” He leaned against the wooden table, and when she sat down on a milk crate across from him, her knee brushed his under the edge, warm through his worn denim jeans. He could feel the heat of it seep through the fabric, and he shifted, embarrassed at the jolt of arousal that shot up his spine. This was wrong, he told himself. This was Claire’s sister. He’d always had a tiny, buried crush on her back when he was married, had shoved it down so deep he’d almost forgotten it existed, thought it was the most shameful thing he’d ever felt.
They talked for 20 minutes, the noise of the market fading into background hum: a bluegrass band plucking a fiddle off to the side, kids screaming as they chased a dog through the grass, the smell of grilled corn and smoked sausage drifting over from the food trucks. She told him she’d moved here a year prior, after her divorce, ran the jam business and a small woodworking shop on the edge of town, made cutting boards and custom furniture. He told her about the cabin, the trail he’d been clearing up behind his property, the way the coyotes howled so loud at night they shook the windows. Every time she leaned forward to grab another jar for a customer, her arm brushed his, and he found himself watching her mouth when she talked, the way she bit her lower lip when she laughed at a joke about the time she’d fallen out of their canoe on a camping trip and landed in a patch of stinging nettles.
He kept waiting for the guilt to hit, for that voice in his head to yell that he was betraying Claire, that this was some kind of sick taboo. But it didn’t. When she said she’d inherited the pearl snap from Claire after she died, that Claire had told her once if anything ever happened to her, she needed to track Cole down, because he was too stubborn to ask anyone for help, the tight knot in his chest unraveled entirely.
She reached across the table then, her fingers brushing the scar on his right knuckle, the one he’d gotten fighting a blaze in eastern Oregon in 2018. Her skin was soft, but there were calluses on her fingertips from sanding wood, rough against his own work-worn hands. “I know you think this is weird,” she said, her voice lower, so no one passing by could hear. She didn’t pull her hand away, and neither did he, wrapping his fingers around hers for a second, the weight of it warm and solid. “But Claire would’ve kicked your ass if she saw you holed up alone in that cabin, talking to your dog more than you talk to actual people.”
He laughed, a real, full laugh, the kind he hadn’t had in months. He bought three jars of jam, two for his neighbor and one for himself, and she scribbled her phone number on the paper receipt, tucking it into the breast pocket of his flannel, her hand brushing his chest when she did it. “My shop’s open at 10 tomorrow,” she said, her eyes not leaving his. “I’ve got an old chainsaw that’s busted. I heard you’re good with that kind of thing. If you’ve got time.”
He nodded, his throat a little tight, and picked up the paper bag with the jam jars clinking inside. He walked back to his beat up Ford F150, the receipt crinkling in his pocket under his hand, and when he got in, he turned the key, Johnny Cash’s *Folsom Prison Blues* blaring from the radio. He rolled the window down, the mountain wind smelling like pine and huckleberry, and he grinned to himself, shaking his head a little at how stupid he’d been to shut everyone out for so long.
He pulled onto the dirt road leading to his cabin, already mentally rearranging his schedule for the next day.
