Ray Voss is 58, retired wildland firefighter, part-time carpenter for the Mesa County senior center, and seven years out from losing his wife to ovarian cancer, he still refuses to show up to any of the center’s overhyped mixers. His biggest flaw, if you ask the ladies who leave chocolate chip cookies on his workbench, is that he’s stubborn enough to pretend he likes being alone more than he actually does. He only showed up to the post-fire mitigation town hall beer garden because the center director begged him to help hang the tent poles that morning, and free craft beer is free craft beer.
He’s leaned against a splintered cedar support pole, plastic cup of hazy IPA sweating through the paper napkin wrapped around it, work boots caked in pine sawdust from a wheelchair ramp he built that week, when someone bumps his left elbow hard enough to slosh beer down his wrist. The woman who hit him is in a forest service uniform shirt, sleeves rolled up to show freckled forearms crisscrossed with thin scratch marks from brush, dark hair pulled back in a messy braid streaked with silver at the temples. Her knuckle brushes the thick, raised scar on his forearm, the one he got in the 2012 Pine Ridge fire when his crew lead made a bad call that sent a wall of flame straight at their line, and he flinches so hard he drops his napkin.
She apologizes, leaning down to grab it, and when she stands back up she’s holding eye contact, no shifty awkward look away, just a half-smirk like she knows exactly what that scar is from. He recognizes her three seconds before she says her name: Mara Hale, ex-wife of Jake Carter, the crew lead he quit working with two weeks after that fire, the guy he hasn’t spoken to in 11 years. His first instinct is to mumble a no problem and walk away, but she sits down on the folding chair next to him before he can move, her knee brushing his denim-clad thigh by accident when she shifts to set her own beer on the rickety plastic table between them.
He can smell lavender shampoo mixed with pine pitch and diesel fumes, the kind of smell that sticks to you after a 12 hour day on a fire line, and it’s so familiar it makes his chest tight. He’d spent 20 years coming home to that exact combination on his wife’s clothes, when she worked seasonal trail crew for the forest service before she got sick. He tells himself he should leave, that talking to Jake’s ex is crossing a line he swore he’d never touch, that the flutter in his chest is just the beer talking, not actual interest. She beats him to the punch, teasing him about still wearing that faded 2010 fire crew hoodie, says she found three of Jake’s old ones in a storage bin when she moved out, donated all of them to the thrift store.
He snorts before he can stop himself. She tells him she left Jake three years ago, after he made the same dumb impulsive call on a controlled burn outside Grand Junction that almost took out half a neighborhood, plus their own garage. She says she read all the incident reports from the Pine Ridge fire when she took the local forest service job three months ago, that Ray was right to report Jake’s call, that the department swept it under the rug because Jake’s uncle was a regional director back then. The anger he’s carried in his shoulders for 11 years softens a little, and he finds himself leaning in when she talks, his knee pressing against hers on purpose this time, not by accident.
The beer is cold going down, the hum of the crowd around them fades into background noise, the crinkle of potato chip bags and the high shriek of kids chasing each other with glow sticks the only sounds that cut through their conversation. She tells him about the reforestation project she’s running on the Pine Ridge burn site, planting saplings where the fire wiped out old ponderosa pines, and he tells her about the treehouse he’s building for his granddaughter, the one he swears is up to fire code even if his daughter teases him about overengineering every board. He catches himself staring at her mouth when she laughs, a low, rough sound not like the high, polite laughs of the women who hit on him at the senior center, and he feels guilty for half a second, like he’s cheating on his wife, before he remembers she’d told him two weeks before she died to stop being an idiot and find someone who makes him laugh again.
When the sun dips below the Bookcliffs, painting the sky pink and tangerine, she asks him if he wants to drive up to the old Pine Ridge lookout tower, the one that survived the 2012 fire, to watch the stars come out. He hesitates for three full beats, the part of him that’s spent seven years walling himself off screaming no, before he says yes. They take her beat up 2008 Ford F150, the seat covered in dog hair from her border collie that she left at home, and when she shifts gears to climb the dirt road up the mountain, her arm brushes his, warm and solid against his bicep. He doesn’t move away.
The lookout is exactly how he remembers it, chipped red paint on the metal rail, a dented metal cooler someone left there stocked with seltzers, the view stretching for 40 miles out over the valley. She leans against the rail next to him, so close their shoulders are pressed together, and she reaches for his left arm, running her finger slow along the edge of his scar, no hesitation, no pity in her touch. She says she’s talked to the state forest service board, that they’re reopening the 2012 incident report next month, that Jake’s finally going to get the disciplinary action he should have gotten 11 years ago.
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, just looks out over the valley, the lights of Grand Junction twinkling far below, the cool mountain air stinging his cheeks a little. When he turns to kiss her, it’s slow, no rushed fumbling, just the taste of IPA and mint gum on her lips, her hand coming up to rest on the back of his neck, calloused from years of hauling fire hoses and planting saplings. He doesn’t overthink it, doesn’t worry about what Jake would think, doesn’t worry about what the ladies at the senior center will say, for the first time in seven years he just lets himself feel it.
They sit on the rail for an hour, talking about nothing and everything, the stars popping bright one by one in the dark blue sky, and when she laces her fingers through his, calloused from years of hauling fire hoses and planting saplings, he doesn’t let go.
