Javi Ruiz, 58, retired wildland fire crew boss, leaned against the scaly bark of a ponderosa pine at the county fire department’s annual end-of-summer cookout, sweating through the faded Nomex shirt he’d refused to throw out after his last fire in 2020. He’d only showed up because three of his former crew members had banged on his front door at 9 a.m. with a six pack of his favorite IPA, calling him a hermit and saying he owed them for covering his shifts when his wife Lila was going through chemo four years prior. His biggest flaw, the one he’d never outrun, was that he hated letting people down, even when it meant subjecting himself to three hours of small town small talk and nosy questions about why he still slept on his side of the bed and never brought a date anywhere.
The air smelled like charred bratwurst, pine sap, and cut alfalfa from the field next to the park, and the hum of distant crickets mixed with the high pitched screams of kids chasing each other around the playground. He’d been avoiding the new county librarian for six months, ever since she’d moved to town from Portland, because everyone at the feed store kept gossiping about how pretty she was, how she was a widow too, how she’d probably set her sights on the quiet, gruff ex-fire boss who lived alone in a cabin on 20 acres at the edge of the national forest. He’d written her off as another stuffy, well-meaning type who’d look at him like he was a broken project to fix, until she walked right up to him, cutting through a crowd of volunteer firefighters carrying a paper plate with a slab of peach pie on it.
She was shorter than he’d expected, wearing a cut off red flannel over a white tank top, bare calves dusted with grass stains, scuffed white Converse instead of the frumpy cardigan and loafers he’d pictured. She got so close when she said his name that he could smell lavender hand soap and lemon polish on her fingers, and when a fire truck siren blared for a demo behind them, she leaned in even further, her shoulder brushing the hard muscle of his bicep, to yell over the noise that she wanted to collect oral histories from former fire crews for the library’s local archive. He froze, the cold beer can slippery in his hand, because no one had touched him that softly, that casually, since Lila died. He almost brushed her off, told her he didn’t do interviews, that he had nothing interesting to say, but she laughed first, a low, warm sound, and held the pie out to him, said she baked it herself, added cardamom just because she thought he’d like it more than plain cinnamon.
The psychological whiplash hit him hard, part of him disgusted that he was even considering talking to her, that he was letting himself feel anything other than the quiet, familiar grief he’d wrapped around himself like a blanket for four years, the other part of him thrumming with a stupid, giddy desire he’d thought was long dead. He glanced over her shoulder, saw a few of the older town ladies staring from the picnic table by the bake sale, and for half a second he almost told her to leave, but then he took the plate from her, his fingers brushing hers, and nodded.
They walked away from the crowd, down a rutted dirt path to the edge of the park where a slow, shallow creek babbled over smooth river rocks, and sat down on a fallen cedar log far enough away that no one could hear them talk. When he leaned over to set his beer on the ground next to the log, his denim-clad knee bumped hers, and neither of them moved away. He took a bite of the pie, the sweet, juicy peach bursting across his tongue, and she told him she’d lost her husband in a car crash three years prior, that she’d moved to this tiny town to get away from all her old friends who kept tiptoeing around her like she’d shatter if someone said his name out loud. He looked over at her, and noticed a tiny smudge of peach filling on her lower lip, and before he could think better of it, he reached out, wiped it off with the rough pad of his thumb, his skin brushing the soft curve of her mouth. She didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away, just held his eye contact, her dark brown eyes warm, no pity, no awkwardness, no expectation.
He didn’t care if the town ladies were gossiping right now, didn’t care if someone told the whole county he’d been seen sitting with the new librarian, didn’t care if he felt like he was betraying Lila by even wanting to spend time with someone else. For the first time in four years, he didn’t feel like he was just going through the motions of living. He asked her if she wanted to come back to his cabin later, said he had a box of old fire crew journals and polaroids from his 20 years on the line that she could look through, and they could finish the pie on his back porch where the crickets were louder and no one would stare. She smiled, pulled a crumpled library checkout slip and a pen out of her flannel pocket, scribbled her number on the back, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his Nomex shirt, her fingers brushing the thick, raised scar on his chest from a 2017 blaze that almost killed him.
The sun dipped below the western ridgeline, painting the sky streaks of tangerine and soft pink, and the sound of the cookout’s country music faded behind them as a small brown cricket hopped onto the toe of his scuffed work boot, and he didn’t bother brushing it off.
