Rafe Mendez, 62, retired smokejumper turned wildfire mitigation consultant, had his Thursday routine down to a science. He’d roll into Missoula at 10 a.m., grab a breakfast sandwich from the food truck by the farmers market, stock up on dill pickles and sourdough from his go-to vendors, then spend an hour nursing a PBR at The Rusty Nail before heading back to his log cabin 20 miles outside town. He’d stuck to that routine for seven years, ever since his wife Elaina died of ovarian cancer, and he saw no reason to mess with it.
The air smelled like cut grass and roasted corn the day he ran into Lila. She was bent over the apothecary booth at the far end of the market, arranging bundles of dried sage, the sun catching the copper streaks in her dark brown hair, freckles splashed across her nose the same as he remembered. She was Elaina’s baby cousin, the kid who used to tag along on their backcountry camping trips, who’d begged Rafe to teach her how to throw a tomahawk when she was 16. He hadn’t seen her in 12 years, not since she moved to Oregon to study herbal medicine.
She looked up when he stopped in front of the booth, and her smile went from polite to bright in half a second. She leaned over the table to hug him, and the scent of lavender and pine resin wrapped around him, warmer than the late August sun. Her arms were firm, calloused at the wrists from digging in garden beds, and when she pulled back she held his gaze a beat longer than felt normal for family. Rafe’s throat went tight. He told himself he was being ridiculous, that he was just out of practice talking to women who weren’t the cashier at the grocery store.
She pressed a small tin of peppermint lip balm into his palm when he mentioned the chapped skin he got from hiking at high elevation. Their fingers brushed, and he felt a jolt run up his arm, the same kind he got when he grabbed a downed power line by mistake on a jump back in 2009. He stuffed the tin in his jacket pocket fast, like it was evidence of something he shouldn’t be thinking about. He made small talk for 10 minutes, asked about her mom, about her move back to Montana, then mumbled an excuse about needing to get his beer and left.
He couldn’t focus on the college football game playing on the bar TV for the life of him. The jukebox in the corner was spinning a Johnny Cash record, low enough that he could barely hear it over the sound of regulars arguing about last weekend’s game, but he still couldn’t shake the memory of the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed, the way her thumb brushed the thin scar across his knuckle when she handed him the lip balm. He felt sick, half of him screaming that this was wrong, that he was betraying Elaina, that the whole town would gossip for months if they so much as saw them grab coffee together. The other half of him couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that spark, that light, fluttery feeling he’d thought died with his wife.
The rain started pouring at 4 p.m., right as he was heading to his truck. He saw her standing under the awning of the closed bookstore down the street, hugging a cardboard box of leftover herb bundles, squinting at the sky like she was debating making a run for her Honda parked two blocks over. He hesitated for 10 full seconds, then jogged over, holding his worn Carhartt jacket over his head to shield both of them.
She thanked him, her shoulder pressed tight to his as they walked to her car. The rain was loud, drumming off the jacket, and he could feel the heat of her body through his flannel shirt. When they got to her car, she set the box on the passenger seat, then turned to face him, so close he could smell the peach iced tea she’d been drinking on her breath. She told him she’d had a crush on him since she was 19, that she’d never said anything because she loved Elaina too much to mess with what they had, that she’d thought about him every time she came back to Montana to visit.
Rafe didn’t say anything for a long time. He thought about the way Elaina used to tease Lila for following him around like a lost puppy, about the last conversation he’d had with his wife, when she told him he deserved to be happy after she was gone, that he didn’t have to spend the rest of his life alone. He thought about the quiet, empty cabin waiting for him, the way he’d eaten dinner alone every night for seven years, the way his chest felt lighter talking to her than it had in almost a decade.
He leaned down and kissed her, slow, the rain dripping off the brim of his faded Griz baseball cap onto her shoulder. She tasted like mint and peach, and when she tangled her hand in the gray hair at the nape of his neck he forgot all about the gossip, about the guilt, about every stupid rule he’d made for himself after Elaina died.
They agreed to take it slow, to not tell anyone for a few months, until they figured out what this was. She gave him her address, scrawled on the back of a business card for her apothecary, and told him to follow her back to her cottage if he wanted to stay for dinner. He nodded, his throat too tight to talk.
He pulled into his truck, set the lip balm tin on the dash next to the crumpled photo of Elaina he kept there, and waited for her to pull out of the parking spot first. The rain let up a little as they drove west out of town, the sun peeking through the clouds to paint the sky pink and orange over the Bitterroot Mountains. He pulled into her driveway 15 minutes later, and she stood on her porch, holding the screen door open for him, grinning. He grabbed the jar of dill pickles he’d bought that morning off the passenger seat, and stepped out into the warm, damp air.
