Clay Bennett is 58, retired U.S. Forest Service ranger, 32 years patrolling the Bitterroot Range, left with a scar slashing his left knuckle from a 2016 grizzly cub encounter, a beat-up Stetson he’s had resoled three times, and a stubborn streak a mile wide that’s kept him from so much as a coffee date since his wife Ellen died of ovarian cancer seven years prior. He’d told every friend who’d tried to set him up the same line: he’d already had his one good love, and he wasn’t going to waste his golden years fumbling through small talk with strangers who didn’t know the difference between a Douglas fir and a Ponderosa pine. Most people stopped asking after the first year.
He’s at the Missoula farmers market on a sticky July Saturday, picking through a jar of pickled beets, when someone bumps his shoulder hard enough to knock his Stetson askew. He turns, ready to grumble, and freezes. The woman in front of him has sun-streaked auburn hair pulled back in a frayed braid, steel-toe work boots caked in mud, dimples so deep he’d know them anywhere. It’s Lila, Ellen’s baby cousin, the kid who used to follow them around on fishing trips when she was still in high school, who’d moved to Oregon right after college and he hadn’t seen in almost 20 years. He does the math quick, she’s 47 now, and when she grins and says his name like she’s been expecting to run into him, his throat goes dry.
They step out of the foot traffic to talk, pressing up against a wooden stall selling huckleberry jam to make room for a group of stroller-pushing tourists. She’s close enough that he can smell pine sap and peppermint lip balm on her, can hear the faint rasp in her voice from a lifetime of breathing wildfire smoke, can feel the warm press of her shoulder against his bicep when a kid on a skateboard zips past and she leans in to avoid being hit. She holds up a jar of jam, offers him a taste on a little wooden spoon, and when he reaches for it their fingers brush. He feels the callus on her index finger, thick and rough from holding a chainsaw, same as his, and he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned, face hot. He’s ashamed of the jolt he feels, disgusted with himself for looking at Ellen’s cousin like that, like she’s just some woman at a bar instead of family.
She doesn’t seem to notice his discomfort, just rambles about moving back to Missoula two weeks prior to take a wildfire mitigation consulting job, about the record blaze burning 60 miles north that’s had her working 12 hour shifts for 10 days straight. She mentions she’s been crashing at Ellen’s old lake cabin, the one Clay signed over to her family after Ellen died, and he’s the first person she’s run into who doesn’t treat her like an outsider. He doesn’t know what to say, so he blurts out an offer to buy her a beer at The Hitching Post, the dive bar down the street that they used to go to after fishing trips back in the day. She says yes before he can even finish the sentence.
The booth in the back of the bar is sticky with decades of spilled soda and beer, the neon Coors sign above them casts a soft pink glow over her sunburnt cheeks, and she orders a huckleberry cider, same as she used to when she was underage and they’d sneak her sips when Ellen wasn’t looking. She leans forward across the table, taps the scar on his left knuckle with her finger, and he doesn’t pull away. She says she remembers that day, the grizzly cub that wandered into their campsite, how he’d stepped between her and the cub, gotten swiped when he was herding it back to its mom, how she’d thought he was the bravest man alive. He admits he’s been lonely, that he thought he’d never feel that little skip in his chest around anyone ever again, that he feels like he’s betraying Ellen even thinking about her that way. She laughs, soft, not mean, and says Ellen used to tell her all the time that if anything ever happened to her, she wanted Clay to stop being such a stubborn jackass and find someone who’d make him happy. She says she’s had a crush on him since she was 17, for Christ’s sake, she’d just never said anything because he was married and she was a kid.
They finish their drinks, walk out into the warm evening, the air thick with the faint acrid smell of distant wildfire smoke and cut alfalfa from the field next to the parking lot. He holds the door of his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150 open for her, and before she climbs in, she leans up and kisses him, slow and soft, and he can taste huckleberry and cider on her lips, the rough, sunburnt edge of her bottom lip against his. He wraps one calloused hand around her waist, pulls her a little closer, doesn’t even glance around to see if any of the old ranger crew or neighbors are watching. She pulls back after a minute, grinning, and asks if he wants to drive up to the lake cabin tonight, teach her how to fix the leaky faucet she’d been complaining about. He nods, grabs his Stetson off the dashboard, tosses it onto the passenger seat, and turns the key in the ignition.
