Elias Voss, 62, spent 32 years manning remote fire lookout towers in the Sierra Nevada before he retired three years prior. His only consistent companion after his wife Linda passed from lung cancer eight years back was a three-legged hound named Red, and his biggest personality flaw was a stubborn refusal to engage with any local community event, convinced they were all just pity-fueled mixers for widows and widowers no one knew what else to do with. His niece, in town for a long weekend from Sacramento, had practically dragged him to the town’s annual summer BBQ, threatening to cancel the fly-fishing trip they’d planned for the next day if he didn’t at least stay an hour.
He’d hidden by the steel beer cooler for the first 45 minutes, nursing a frosty Pabst Blue Ribbon that left condensation beading on his calloused fingertips, wearing a faded forest service flannel even as the 82-degree heat stuck the cotton to the scar on his left forearm, a memento from a stray ember that caught him off guard during the 2018 Camp Fire response. The air smelled like charcoal, grilled bratwurst, and cut grass, and he’d tuned out three separate attempts at small talk from neighbors he’d lived near for 12 years before he caught the sharp, warm scent of cinnamon sugar curling through the breeze.
He turned, and there was Marisol Reyes, 58, owner of the town’s only bakery, ex-wife of his old fire crew lead Jimmie, who’d moved to Scottsdale with a 34-year-old yoga instructor four years prior. She was holding a dented aluminum tray stacked with mini churro bites, flour dust dusting the knee of her high-waisted jeans, a smudge of chocolate on her left cheek. She spotted him immediately, and grinned, the same wide, crinkly-eyed grin he’d spent 15 years pretending he didn’t notice back when both of them were married, when Jimmie would bring her to crew cookouts and she’d slip him extra empanadas because she knew he forgot to pack lunch most days he was on tower duty.
She walked over, and set the tray down on the picnic table next to him, her elbow brushing his bicep as she reached for a napkin. “I knew you’d be hiding over here. Linda always said you’d rather outwait a lightning storm than make small talk with the PTA moms.”
Elias tensed for half a second at the mention of Linda, the familiar twist of guilt in his gut – the same guilt that had stopped him from even texting a woman back when a cousin tried to set him up two years prior. But Marisol didn’t look pitying, just amused, so he huffed a laugh, grabbed a churro bite. It was warm, the sugar crunching between his teeth, and he nearly groaned out loud, he’d forgotten how good her baking was. “How’d you even know I was here? My niece dragged me kicking and screaming.”
“Word travels fast in a town of 1200 people.” She sat down next to him on the bench, their knees brushing through the thin denim of their jeans, and he felt the heat of her leg all the way up to his hip. She nodded at the scar on his forearm, her fingers hovering an inch away before she touched it, light, like she was afraid he’d flinch. “I heard about that. Jimmie called me when it happened, said you refused to go to the hospital until you’d mapped the entire fire perimeter.”
He shrugged, watching her fingers on his skin, the calluses on the tips from kneading bread every morning at 4 a.m. “Wasn’t that bad. Needed to make sure the cabins on the west ridge got evacuated first.” They talked for an hour, the beer cans piling up next to the empty churro tray, him telling her about the time a black bear climbed the stairs to his lookout tower and stole half his peanut butter crackers, her laughing so hard she snort-laughed, her hand slapping his knee. She told him about Jimmie’s latest Instagram posts from Arizona, him posing with his new wife on a jet ski, and Elias felt that weird, roiling tension in his chest: half disgust that Jimmie had left someone this good for a midlife crisis, half sharp, unnameable desire that he’d been shoving down for decades, that he’d thought died with Linda.
Elias froze, the memory hitting him out of nowhere. He’d picked those blackberries on his way down from the tower, remembered her saying they were her favorite, had left them on her porch because he didn’t want to overstep. He’d never thought she’d known it was him. He hesitated for two beats, the old guilt screaming in his ear that this was wrong, that Linda would hate this, that Jimmie was his friend, but then he looked at her, her dark eyes bright in the string light glow, the chocolate smudge still on her cheek, and he nodded.
She pulled him to the makeshift dance floor, her hand in his, and he rested his hand on her waist, the fabric of her linen shirt soft under his palm. She smelled like jasmine perfume and cinnamon, her head resting on his shoulder for half the song, and he could feel the beat of her heart through his shirt, slow and steady. No one stared, no one commented, the other couples dancing around them too wrapped up in their own conversations to pay attention. When the song ended, she tilted her head up, her mouth an inch from his, and he could taste beer and sugar on her breath when she kissed him first, quick, soft, her hand curling into the hair at the nape of his neck. He didn’t pull away.
When they pulled back, she grinned, wiping a smudge of lipstick off his chin with her thumb. “I got a fresh peach pie cooling on my kitchen counter. Baked it this morning. Wanna come over for a slice?”
Elias grabbed his flannel off the picnic bench, slung it over his shoulder, and nodded. Red would be fine for another hour, he’d left a full bowl of food out before he left. They walked to her beat up 2012 Subaru, her hand brushing his every few steps, the crickets chirping loud in the pine trees around them. For the first time in nearly a decade, Elias didn’t feel the urge to rush back to his empty cabin alone.
