Rafe Marquez is 53, spent 22 years as a smokejumper with the U.S. Forest Service before a blown knee during a 2020 blaze outside Helena forced his early retirement. Now he runs Rafe’s Gear Fix on Bozeman’s Main Street, repairs puffy jackets, broken tent poles, frayed climbing webbing for anyone who can pay, and for a lot of folks who can’t. His biggest flaw, one he’ll admit to only when he’s three beers deep and no one he knows is listening, is that he’s spent the last seven years actively avoiding any human connection that doesn’t involve swapping stories about trail conditions or the best way to seal a hole in a raft. His ex-wife moved to Portland with a software developer the week he got out of physical therapy, and he’s carried a chip on his shoulder about anyone associated with the city’s “revitalization” crowd ever since.
She’s the woman who opened the used bookstore three blocks down from his shop two months prior, he recognizes her immediately, and he tenses up before he can stop himself. She’s married to Tyler Hale, the new city councilman who spent 20 minutes at last month’s public meeting calling Rafe’s shop a “blight on Main Street’s family friendly image” and pushing to deny him his annual business license. He’s spent the last four weeks muttering curse words about Tyler Hale every time he sees a campaign sign stuck in a front yard, so the last thing he expects is for her to grin at him, nod at the faded smokejumper patch sewn to the chest of his well-worn flannel, and say, “Cool patch. I’ve got a 1972 memoir about smokejumpers in the Cascades in my shop, I’ve been meaning to bring it by.”
Her name is Lila. Her palm is still pressed to his elbow, and he can feel the rough callus on the side of her index finger, the kind you get from turning thousands of book pages, and he’s suddenly hyper aware of the sweat beading at the back of his neck, the fact that he hasn’t showered since he finished a repair job on a whitewater raft earlier that day. He mumbles a thank you, tries to step back, but the crowd surges around them as a group of firefighters carry a tray of jello shots past, and she steps closer, her shoulder brushing the thick muscle of his bicep as she leans in to talk over the band’s new, even louder cover of Merle Haggard.
“Tyler’s an idiot, for the record,” she says, her voice warm against his ear, and he smells lavender shampoo and the faint, sweet scent of old paper on her clothes. “He’s never even been in your shop. I stop by the window at least twice a week to watch you work. You do really beautiful things with torn up fabric and broken poles.”
He’s torn. Half of him wants to tell her to go back to her fancy councilman husband, to stop wasting his time, to not pretend she cares about a guy who can’t even afford to repaint the front of his shop. The other half of him can’t stop staring at the flecks of gold in her green eyes, the way she tucks a strand of chestnut hair behind her ear when she laughs at the dumb joke he makes about smokejumpers burning every meal they cook on the fire line. They end up standing next to each other at the beer tent for 20 minutes, talking about nothing and everything, and every time someone passes too close, she brushes against him, and every time their fingers touch when they pass each other fresh cans of cold IPA, he feels a jolt he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager sneaking into bars with his high school friends.
He tells himself he’s being stupid. That she’s married, that her husband wants to put him out of business, that getting involved with her will only bring more of the small town gossip he’s spent years avoiding. But when she leans in again, her breath fanning against his jaw, and tells him she’s been sleeping on the couch in the back of her bookstore for three months, that she filed for divorce two weeks prior and hasn’t told anyone yet, all of that resistance melts away. She lifts her hand, brushes her thumb across the thick, silvery scar that runs the length of his left forearm, the one he got when a burning tree branch fell on him during the 2018 Yellowstone blaze, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away.
“I saw that scar through your shop window once,” she says, quiet enough only he can hear. “I wondered what the story was. I still want to hear it, if you’ll let me.”
He asks her if she wants to get out of the park after the raffle, head back to his shop, he’ll show her the stack of old jump logs he keeps locked in a cabinet in the back, and he’ll make her a pot of the strong, bitter cowboy coffee he drinks every morning. She nods, grins, slips her phone into the front pocket of his flannel so he can text her when he’s ready to leave, then turns to walk back to the table where her husband is yelling at a city employee about the barbecue’s trash cans.
Rafe pulls her phone out of his pocket for half a second, taps his number into her contacts, then shoves it back, takes a long sip of his beer. The band is still playing off-key country, the kid with the neon scooter is zooming past his feet again, and for the first time in seven years, he doesn’t feel the urge to lock his shop door and hide when the sun goes down.
