Clay Bennett drags his work boots across the gravel parking lot of the county park, already regretting caving to his neighbor’s plea to attend the wildfire relief chili cookoff. At 58, 12 years retired from the U.S. Forest Service and 12 years divorced, he’s made a point of skipping every local community event for a decade, mostly to avoid running into his ex-wife or anyone who’d feel obligated to ask how he’s holding up. The scar where his left pinky used to be throbs a little under the tooled leather bracelet he made in physical therapy after the 2017 Lolo Peak fire, a nervous tic he’s never shaken. He grabs a can of Pabst from the dented metal cooler propped under a ponderosa pine, nods at a pair of old firefighter buddies he recognizes manning a chili booth, and leans back against the trunk to people-watch, planning to duck out in 20 minutes max.
A woman’s arm brushes his when she reaches past him for a black cherry seltzer, her elbow grazing the cuff of his frayed gray flannel, and he catches a whiff of jasmine perfume mixed with cedar sawdust, a scent that yanks him back 30 years faster than any tattered old photograph. He looks down, and it’s Mia. His ex-wife’s younger sister. She’s 49 now, streaks of silver threading through her dark curly hair, a faint white scar slicing across the left side of her jaw from the time she got thrown off a quarter horse on her parents’ ranch when she was 17. She blinks, then grins, the same small gap between her two front teeth he’d always thought was unfairly charming, even when he was married to her sister. “Clay Bennett. I’d know that permanent ranger squint anywhere.”
His first impulse is to mumble an excuse and leave. He’d spent the entire 14-year marriage avoiding looking at Mia too long, avoiding being alone with her, because the pull had been there even then, a quiet, shameful thrum in his chest he’d written off as temporary stupidity. Now he’s torn between the instinct to run, the lingering anger at her family for unilaterally taking his ex’s side in the divorce, and the stupid, thrumming curiosity he can’t shake no matter how hard he tries. She leans in to talk over the roar of the crowd, the hum of food truck generators and the yells of kids chasing each other across the grass, and her shoulder presses firm against his bicep. She says she’s in town for six weeks helping her mom recover from knee replacement surgery, that she’d just driven in from Boise that morning, that she’d even asked the volunteer at the check-in table if he was going to be here.
The can of beer in his hand is cold enough to make his knuckles ache. He can feel the heat of her arm through his flannel, soft and steady. She keeps glancing at his leather bracelet, and when she asks if he still wears it to cover the fire scar, he doesn’t think before he slips it off, holding out his hand to show her the knobbly, healed stub where his pinky used to be, the skin still slightly pink and tight around the edge. Her fingers brush the edge of the scar, soft and warm, and he feels a jolt run up his arm all the way to the base of his neck. He tells himself this is wrong, that half the town knows exactly who she is, that if anyone sees them talking this close they’ll run their mouths straight to his ex before the sun even sets. But when she teases him about still driving that beat up 2008 F-150 he bought the year they got married, when she says she always thought he was too good for her sister, that she knew her sister was cheating on him three years before he found out and felt sick that she never worked up the nerve to tell him, the tight, angry knot in his chest loosens a little.
They slip off to the edge of the park, away from the crowd, sitting on the splintered top rail of an old split rail fence that overlooks the Bitterroot Valley. The sun is dipping below the mountains now, painting the sky streaky pink and tangerine, and the air smells like cut grass, smoked brisket, and pine resin. Their knees knock every time one of them shifts, and when he brushes a stray curl off her face, his thumb brushing the raised edge of the scar on her jaw, she doesn’t pull away. She rests her hand on his thigh, her palm warm through the worn denim of his work jeans, and tells him she used to sit on the porch of her parents’ ranch when she was 19, waiting for him to come over to fix the barbed wire fence, that she’d daydream about him leaving her sister for her even though she knew it was impossible. He doesn’t say anything for a minute, because he’s spent 30 years pushing that exact same thought out of his head, too guilty to admit he’d wanted the same thing.
He asks her if she wants to get pie and coffee at the diner off Main Street, the one that’s open till 10, that still makes the huckleberry pie she used to beg her mom to buy her when she was a kid. She nods, grinning so wide the gap between her teeth shows, and slips her hand into his when they walk back toward the parking lot. They pass a couple from his neighborhood, the wife raising an eyebrow so high it almost disappears under her softball league baseball cap, but Clay doesn’t care. He’s spent 12 years hiding from people he doesn’t even like, 12 years holding onto anger that doesn’t serve him, 12 years pretending he didn’t want the one thing he’d always thought he couldn’t have. When she opens the passenger door of his beat up F-150, she pauses, winks, and tells him she’s been waiting 30 years to ride in that truck.
