Cole Henderson is 58, retired after 32 years as a Yellowstone backcountry ranger, and he’d rather face a charging grizzly with nothing but a walkie-talkie than make small talk with the gaggle of retiree ladies who man the farmers market jam booth every Saturday. He’s avoided the market for weeks, actually, but his jar of raw clover honey ran out three days ago, and the store-bought stuff tastes like processed corn syrup to his tongue, dulled by decades of sipping coffee over campfires at 6 a.m. His wife, Mara, used to drag him here every weekend, even when they were living in the park and driving three hours each way for peaches and fresh sourdough, so he still feels a twinge of guilt when he cuts through the craft booths to get to the honey stand fast, eyes down to avoid eye contact with anyone who might try to set him up with their widowed cousin or their friend from water aerobics.
The July heat sticks to the back of his neck, thick and sweet with the smell of grilled corn and cut alfalfa, when he turns too fast to dodge a kid chasing a golden retriever and slams his shoulder into someone carrying a half-dozen glass jars of dill pickles. One jar slips, shatters on the asphalt, brine pooling at his scuffed work boots. He’s already sputtering an apology when he looks up, and his throat goes dry. It’s Lila. Mara’s baby sister, the one who showed up to their wedding barefoot with a tattoo of a wolf on her wrist, the one he hasn’t seen since Mara’s funeral seven years prior, when she slipped out before the wake ended and didn’t leave a forwarding address.
She’s 42 now, her dark hair streaked with one thick silver streak above her left ear, cut short enough that it curls at the nape of her neck. She’s wearing cutoff flannel, work boots caked in mud, and the same silver hoop earring Mara saved up three months of babysitting money to buy her for her 18th birthday. For half a second he feels a sharp, hot jolt of shame, like he’s doing something wrong just looking at her, like Mara’s standing right behind him shaking her head. He bends fast to pick up the shards of glass, and she bends too, their knuckles brushing when they both reach for the same sharp chunk at his boot. Her palm is calloused, rough from mucking stalls or packing climbing gear, and she smells like pine soap and wild blackberry, the same perfume Mara used to wear, but mixed with the faint, sharp tang of clove cigarette.
“Cole Henderson,” she says, grinning, and her voice is lower than he remembers, rough from too many bonfires or too many miles of yelling over mountain wind. “Still wearing that beat up hat Mara made you throw out three times, I see.”
He rubs the back of his neck, flustered, and offers to pay for the jar of pickles, plus the rest of her order, whatever she wants. She waves him off, says the pickle guy owes her a favor anyway, she helped him pull his pickup out of a ditch last winter. She asks if he’s got time for a beer, says the dive bar two blocks over still serves the same cold draft they used to drink after Mara’s college soccer games, back when Cole was still a seasonal ranger and Lila was still sneaking into bars with a fake ID that said she was 27.
He wants to say no. He wants to make an excuse about having to feed his neighbor’s cat, or fix the leak in his roof, or any of the dozen boring lies he tells people when they ask him to hang out. But she’s looking up at him, her dark eyes crinkled at the corners the exact same way Mara’s used to when she was about to talk him into something stupid, and he nods before he can think better of it.
The bar smells like fried peanuts and old beer, the booth in the back sticky with decades of spilled soda and whiskey. She slides into the seat across from him, and when she stretches her legs out under the table, her knee presses against his, warm through the thin denim of his work pants. He tenses at first, then relaxes, because it doesn’t feel wrong, not like he thought it would. She tells him she moved back to Bozeman six months prior, runs the equine therapy program at the horse rescue outside of town, that she avoided reaching out to him because she thought he hated her for bailing on the funeral cleanup, that she was too wrecked over Mara to stay and listen to everyone tell stories about how perfect she was, like she didn’t used to sneak Lila sips of wine when their parents weren’t looking or prank Cole by hiding his ranger hat in the bear box when they were camping.
He admits he’d avoided asking anyone about her for years, because he felt guilty for noticing her, even when Mara was alive. That he’d thought it was a flaw, some ugly part of him that he should lock away, that he was betraying the 28 years he had with Mara by even feeling that little jolt when she walked in a room. She goes quiet for a minute, swirling her beer around the bottom of her glass, then leans across the table, her elbow brushing his, and says Mara talked to her about it, once, a year before she got sick. Said she knew Cole was too stubborn to ever act on it, but if anything ever happened to her, she wanted Lila to make sure he wasn’t spending the rest of his life alone, drinking bad coffee and talking to his old ranger buddies and refusing to let anyone get close.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time, just stares at the silver hoop in her ear, the same one he’d teased Mara about buying for her all those years ago, said she was turning her little sister into a delinquent. He reaches across the table, brushes his thumb against the edge of the hoop, then the soft skin of her cheek, and she doesn’t pull away. She leans into the touch, just a little, and the corner of her mouth tugs up in that same familiar grin.
They leave the bar as the sun dips below the Bridger Mountains, painting the sky pink and orange. He carries her canvas bag of market goods, pickles and peaches and a jar of the same honey he came to buy, and she links her arm through his, her palm warm against his bicep. The street is still busy with people heading to the food trucks parked by the park, kids running around with popsicles dripping down their wrists. A group of teen skateboarders yell a playful catcall as they pass, and Lila laughs, squeezing his bicep hard enough that he can feel the pressure through his worn denim shirt.
