Javier Mendez, 53, leans back on the splintered pine picnic table at the county VFW’s weekly Wednesday fish fry, wiping catfish crumbs off the calloused heel of his hand. He’s got a half-empty mason jar of sweet tea at his elbow, work boots still caked with pine bark from splitting oak that morning, and a scar snaking across his left jaw from a 2017 blaze that left him with a permanent wheeze and a medical discharge from the wildland fire crew he’d run for 18 years. These days he runs a small forest stewardship and firewood delivery outfit, keeps to himself mostly, turns down every half-joking offer from the VFW ladies to set him up with their widowed sisters or divorced coworkers. He’s got his routine, he tells himself, and he doesn’t need anyone messing it up.
He tenses up immediately, half out of surprise, half out of the old, familiar guilt that rises every time he looks at her. Tom made him promise to look out for her the night before he died in a 2013 timber fire outside of Boone, and Javier has always taken that promise so seriously he’s barely even spoken to her more than five minutes at a time over the last decade, even when she’d stop by the fire station with cookies for the crew, even when he’d catch her staring at him across Tom’s funeral reception, eyes red from crying. He’s thought about her, though. More than he’s willing to admit even to himself. The thought makes his throat tight, half shame, half something warmer he’s spent years shoving down.
She laughs when he doesn’t say anything, wiping crumbs off her chin, and her knee brushes his under the table by accident. He flinches at first, then doesn’t move his leg away. The denim of her jeans is soft through the worn fabric of his work pants, and he can feel the heat of her calf through the material. “You gonna act like you don’t know me, Mendez?” she says, holding his eye contact longer than anyone else dares to these days, her brown eyes crinkling at the corners. “I brought you a jar of pine candle last week, left it on your porch. You never called to say you got it.”
He clears his throat, picks at a splinter on the table. “Got it. Smells good. Didn’t want to bother you.” He’s never been good at small talk, never been good at saying the things he actually means, and right now his brain is racing half a mile a minute, torn between the instinct to get up and leave, to protect the promise he made to Tom, and the much louder, much harder to ignore instinct to stay, to ask her how she’s been, to tell her he’s thought about her every time he’s driven past her shop on Main Street.
She leans further across the table, and her hand brushes his when she passes him an extra packet of hot sauce he didn’t ask for, chipped navy blue nail polish glinting in the string lights strung above the tables. The touch is light, just her fingertips against the back of his knuckle, but it sends a jolt up his arm like static off dry pine in the middle of summer. “You never bother me,” she says, quiet enough that the band’s noise drowns it out for everyone but him. “I’ve been waiting for you to talk to me since I moved back. I figured you’d either show up at my shop eventually or I’d have to corner you here.”
He stares at her for a long second, the noise of the fish fry fading into the background, the guilt warring with the warm, tight feeling in his chest he hasn’t felt since before his wife left eight years prior. He’s spent 10 years convincing himself that wanting her is a betrayal, that Tom would hate him for even looking at her that way, but she’s looking at him like she knows exactly what he’s thinking, like she’s been waiting just as long as he has.
When she asks him if he wants to walk down to the lake with her after they finish eating, he doesn’t hesitate, just nods, grabs his jacket off the back of the bench. The leaves crunch under their boots as they walk the half mile down the paved trail, the air crisp enough that he can see his breath when he exhales, the sunset painting the sky pink and tangerine over the water. They sit down on the end of the old wooden dock, their shoulders pressing together when they lean back on their hands, and she tells him that Tom knew, that he used to tease her about her crush on Javier when they were kids, that he told her once if anyone was ever good enough for her, it was him, he just knew Javier was too stubborn to make the first move.
The guilt he’s carried for 10 years melts off his shoulders like ice in spring, and he doesn’t say anything, just laces his calloused fingers through hers, her hand soft and warm in his, the sound of crickets chirping in the trees along the shore. He watches a heron glide low across the surface of the water, the first stars coming out above the treeline, and feels the tight, closed-off part of his chest he’s carried for years finally relax.
He tilts his head down to kiss her, slow, the vanilla and cedar scent of her hair filling his nose, and she leans into him, her hand coming up to rest light on the scar along his jaw.
