Cole Henderson, 58, retired Forest Service Hotshot, leaned against a splintered cedar fence post at the Nederland wildfire relief block party, sweating through the cuffs of his faded gray flannel. His neighbor had dragged him out an hour prior, saying if he holed up in his cabin one more weekend watching old football tapes he was gonna turn into a bear. The IPA in his hand was sweated through, cold dripping down his wrist, and he’d already mapped three exits if he needed to bolt before anyone tried to make small talk about his four years as a widower.
He spotted her across the crowd first, holding a stack of donation flyers, auburn hair pulled back in a messy braid, wearing that ratty navy Forest Service tee he’d bought Mara, his late wife, for their 25th anniversary back in 2010. It was Lila, Mara’s niece, the kid he’d taught to cast a fishing rod when she was 12, the one who’d crashed his ATV into a pine tree at 16 and still had the thin, silvery scar on her left wrist to show for it. He hadn’t seen her since Mara’s funeral, when she’d hugged him tight and said she’d check in soon, then they’d both gotten too wrapped up in grieving to follow through.
She spotted him before he could duck behind the port-a-potty, her face lighting up like she’d just found a $20 bill in an old coat pocket. She crossed the grass fast, her cutoff denim shorts brushing the tops of scuffed work boots, and stopped half a foot away first, like she was checking if he’d pull away. When he didn’t, she leaned in for a hug, her bare arm brushing the side of his neck, and he smelled coconut sunscreen and pine, the same scent Mara used to wear when they’d go camping on the Continental Divide.
He froze for half a second, that sharp, uncomfortable twist of guilt hitting him first—this was Mara’s niece, for Christ’s sake, he’d changed her diapers when she was a toddler. But then she pulled back, grinning, and he saw the freckles across her nose, the little silver hoop in her left nostril, the calluses on her palms when she clapped him on the shoulder, and he realized she wasn’t a kid anymore. She was 32, a Hotshot crew lead out of Fort Collins, she told him, she’d moved to Nederland six months prior to help with post-fire restoration, kept meaning to drop by his cabin but didn’t want to intrude on the quiet he’d clearly worked so hard to build.
She sat down next to him on the warped wood picnic bench, her knee brushing his every time someone squeezed past to get to the beer truck, and he found himself talking before he could stop himself. He told her about the elk that kept breaking into his bird feeder, the way the creek behind his cabin had risen so much that spring he’d almost lost his old fishing dock. She told him about her crew, the 19-year-old kid who’d burned his hand on a controlled burn two weeks prior, how she still had the lopsided wooden birdhouse he’d made her for her 13th birthday hanging on her apartment balcony.
Every time she laughed, she leaned in a little closer, her shoulder pressing into his bicep, and he kept having to remind himself to breathe. He’d spent four years avoiding any kind of physical contact that wasn’t a stiff handshake from the hardware store clerk, and now he was hyper-aware of every point where their bodies brushed, the warmth of her thigh through the thin fabric of his jeans, the way her hair tickled his forearm when she leaned forward to grab a fry off his plate. The guilt was still there, quiet but persistent, that low voice in his head saying he was betraying Mara, that this was wrong, that he should get up and leave right now. But then she’d say something stupid, like how she’d tried to make Mara’s famous chocolate chip cookies last week and burned them so bad the smoke alarm went off for an hour, and the guilt would melt away a little, replaced by something softer, warmer, a feeling he’d thought he’d never feel again.
The band switched to a slow, twangy Johnny Cash cover, and she stood up, wiping fry crumbs off her shorts, and held out her hand. He stared at it for a second, the scar on her wrist right there, bright against her tanned skin, and he thought of Mara, sitting on this same bench 1
