Cole Henderson, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service ranger, spent 32 years patrolling the Willamette National Forest, still wears the same scuffed steel-toe boots he had on his last day on the job. Stubborn to a fault, he has spent the last decade turning down invitations to every town event, still carries a photo of his old partner Jake tucked in his wallet, and hasn’t spoken more than a dozen words at a time to Mara, Jake’s widow, since the funeral. He only showed up to the annual fire department chili cookoff because his 27-year-old daughter begged him to, said he was turning into a hermit who only talked to his two hound dogs. He’s perched on the back of a folding chair at the far edge of the tent, paper bowl of three-alarm chili in one hand, lukewarm Pabst in the other, watching a group of volunteer firefighters argue over who made the spiciest batch.
Mara spots him first. She’s 56, runs a small goat farm on the edge of town, won the mayoral election six months prior by 127 votes, still shows up to every community event in work boots and jeans instead of the blazers the local paper keeps telling her to wear. She’d spent the morning hauling folding tables and stirring pots of chili for the volunteer team, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid, streaks of silver catching the string lights strung across the tent ceiling. She walks over without hesitation, sliding into the empty folding chair next to him, their knees knocking hard enough to make his beer slosh over the edge of the can onto his jeans.
He tenses immediately, already halfway to standing to leave, when she rests a hand on his forearm to hold him in place. Her palm is calloused from hauling hay bales and trimming goat hooves, warm through the worn flannel of his shirt. She teases him about still loading his chili with enough habanero sauce to make a moose cry, same as he did on every backcountry patrol trip the three of them took back when Jake was still alive. He can smell pine soap on her flannel, vanilla lip balm, a faint whiff of the cinnamon gum she always chews. The sound of her laugh is rough around the edges, rougher than it was 10 years ago, like she still smokes half a pack of menthols a day when she thinks no one is looking.
The guilt hits him sharp in the chest, same as it always does when he’s around her. He’d had a dumb, quiet crush on her for years, even when she was still married to Jake, never acted on it, never even said a word about it to anyone, would have rather cut off his own hand than betray the man who’d had his back when a grizzly charged their camp in 2011. After Jake died in that tree fall on patrol, Cole shut her out entirely, figured it was the right thing to do, figured if he stayed away, he wouldn’t end up doing something he’d regret, something that would make Jake roll in his grave. He opens his mouth to mumble an excuse about needing to get home to feed the dogs, when she says his name soft, stops him cold.
She tells him she knows he’s been avoiding her. Says Jake told her, a few months before he died, that he knew how Cole felt about her, that he didn’t mind, that he loved both of them, that if anything ever happened to him, he wanted Cole to look out for her, not hide in his cabin like a wounded bear. She leans in a little when she says it, their shoulders pressing together, the rough fabric of her flannel rubbing against his. He stares at her, really stares, for the first time in 10 years he doesn’t look away when her eyes meet his. He can see the flecks of gold in her hazel irises, the tiny scar above her left eyebrow from when she fell off her horse on that camping trip in 2012, the one where he’d cleaned the cut for her while Jake teased him for being softer with her than he was with the orphaned fawn they’d rescued that same weekend.
She brushes a crumb of cornbread off his chin with her thumb, tip of her finger brushing the gray stubble on his jaw, and he doesn’t flinch away. He admits he’s been an idiot, that he spent 10 years lonely just because he thought he was doing the right thing. She laughs, shakes her head, says Jake always said Cole was the most stubborn son of a bitch he ever met, that he’d kick Cole’s ass if he knew he’d spent a decade turning down her invitations to dinner, to coffee, to help her fix the fence on her farm, all out of some misplaced sense of loyalty.
When they reach her beat-up Ford F150, she leans in before he can say goodnight, kisses him soft, tastes like cinnamon gum and the root beer she’d been drinking all night. He kisses her back, one hand resting light on her hip, no guilt, no hesitation, the old photo of Jake tucked in his wallet pressing light against his chest. She pulls away after a minute, grinning, and asks him if he wants to come back to her farm for coffee, says she just made a fresh batch of peach pie that afternoon. He nods, doesn’t even think about making an excuse about the dogs, about the time, about any of the dumb reasons he would have made a week ago. He opens the passenger side door for her, waits until she’s climbed in before he walks around to the driver’s side to get in.
