Clay Bennett is 58, retired three years from the Idaho City forest service fire crew, now runs a one-man custom cabinet shop out of his double garage east of Boise. His worst flaw is he holds grudges longer than he holds a line against a pine beetle infestation; for 18 months, he’s ranted about Mara Hale, the new school board president, to anyone who’ll listen at his weekly poker game, blaming her for cutting the high school shop class he’d volunteered at for 12 years. He’s never met her. He’d skipped every community event the school district hosted since the cut, even turned down free brisket at the fall fundraiser on principle.
His buddy Ron drags him to the summer beer garden fundraiser in the park mid-July, bribing him with the promise of smoked brats from Moe’s, the old butcher who’s been cutting his steaks since the 90s. The air smells like charcoal, cherry Kool-Aid, and pine drifting off the foothills, 80s Merle Haggard warbling through crackling speakers strung between gnarled oak trees. Clay’s halfway through his second IPA, leaning against a splintered picnic table picking at a bratwurst slathered in sauerkraut and spicy mustard, when Ron nods toward the beer tent 10 feet away. “There’s your nemesis, by the way.”
Clay looks up. She’s leaning over a cooler stacked with frosty cans, auburn hair streaked with silver pulled back in a loose braid, a faded 1998 forest service fire crew hoodie peeking out under her school board volunteer lanyard. She’s wiping condensation off her forearms, calloused at the wrists, nails chipped with flecks of what looks like oak sawdust under the chipped clear polish. She looks up, catches him staring, and grins, crookedly, one dimple popping in her left cheek. He freezes. He’d pictured her as a stuffy, pantsuit-clad bureaucrat with a stick up her ass, not a woman who looks like she could swing a circular saw better than half his old fire crew.
He wanders over to get a third beer 10 minutes later, telling himself he’s just curious, not because he can’t stop staring at the way the sun hits the gray strands in her hair when she tilts her head to laugh at a kid begging for a root beer. She leans across the cooler to hand him his IPA, their fingers brushing when he takes the can, her skin cool from grabbing ice, rough with calluses in the exact same spots his are from holding planer handles for hours on end. “Clay Bennett, right?” she says, and he blinks. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for three months. Your friend Ron kept saying you’d never take my call.”
He blusters at first, brings up the shop class cut, and she snorts, leaning against the cooler post so her shoulder is six inches from his, close enough he can smell vanilla shampoo and the faint hoppy scent of the pale ale she’s sipping from a dented aluminum cup. She tells him she fought the rest of the board for six months to reverse the cut, that she’d voted against it the first time, that she used to take shop classes with her dad, who was on the fire crew with Clay back in 1996. She pulls out her phone to show him a photo of her dad in the exact same 1998 hoodie, and Clay remembers him, a quiet guy who made the best chocolate chip pancakes at fire camp during the 1999 Sawtooth blaze.
They talk for 45 minutes, the crowd around the beer tent thinning as families pack up to take their kids home for bedtime, fireflies starting to blink low over the grass near the creek. She taps his forearm when he tells a story about a 2001 fire that jumped the line, her palm warm through his thin cotton work t-shirt, and when a stray tuft of pink cotton candy sticks to her shoulder, he reaches out to brush it off, his fingers brushing the soft, worn fabric of her hoodie, lingering a beat too long before he pulls away. She doesn’t flinch, just holds his eye contact, her hazel eyes crinkling at the corners like she knows exactly what he’s thinking, the part of him that’s still furious at the board warring with the part of him that hasn’t felt this light since his wife passed seven years prior.
He’s supposed to meet the poker guys at the dive bar downtown in 20 minutes. He’d spent 18 months badmouthing this woman to every single one of them. But when she tilts her head, nods toward the parking lot, and says “The shop space is all finished up, if you want to come look at it. No one’s at the school tonight. I can show you the new 10-inch table saw they budgeted for,” he doesn’t even hesitate.
He tells Ron he’s bailing on poker, ignores the knowing wag of his friend’s eyebrows, and follows her to her beat-up 2008 Ford Ranger, the cab smelling like sawdust and peppermint gum when he climbs in. She pulls out of the parking lot, one hand resting on the gear shift six inches from his knee, and he doesn’t even think about the grudges he’s been holding, or the poker game, or what his friends would say if they saw him right now.
