Rafe Marquez, 62, retired wildland firefighter turned native plant nursery owner, wiped pine sap off his work gloves and squinted into the 9 a.m. sun beating down on the Boise Farmers Market. Eight years removed from losing his wife to ovarian cancer, he’d perfected the art of keeping people at arm’s length: gruff one-word answers to customer small talk, skipping the neighborhood cookouts his sister badgered him to attend, never letting his gaze linger too long on the peach stand three stalls down. The scar slashing across his left cheek, a souvenir from pulling a 22-year-old rookie out of a burning fir stand during the 2017 Eagle Fire, usually did most of the work for him, making strangers hesitate before striking up a conversation he didn’t want anyway.
The smell of roasted chiles and kettle corn curled through the air, kids screamed as they chased a golden retriever past his table of sage starts and milkweed plugs, and he glanced over at the peach stand on instinct. Elara, the 58-year-old former backcountry park ranger who ran it, was dabbing peach juice off the chin of a toddler who’d snuck a bite while his mom paid, her laugh bright enough to cut through the noise. Rafe looked away fast, the tips of his ears burning. He’d nodded at her twice in two months, never said a word, convinced even a hello would open a door he’d nailed shut years ago. He told himself the flutter in his chest when he saw her was just indigestion from the breakfast burrito he’d scarfed down an hour earlier.
A gust of wind picked up right as he reached for his stack of plant care sheets, sending half of them skittering across the asphalt straight to Elara’s feet. He swore under his breath, trundled over, and knelt down at the same time she did, their hands brushing when they both grabbed for the same neon-green sheet. His skin buzzed. He’d forgotten how calloused another person’s hands could feel, how warm, how they didn’t flinch at the rough, fire-damaged skin on his knuckles. She smelled like ripe peach and coconut sunscreen, the same kind his wife used to wear on camping trips, and for half a second he thought he might throw up, caught between the sharp, familiar twist of guilt and the stupid, giddy spark he hadn’t felt in close to a decade.
“Yours, I’m guessing?” She held out the stack of sheets, her hazel eyes flecked with green crinkling at the corners when she smiled, and she didn’t look away from his scar, didn’t even blink. Rafe mumbled a thank you, stuffed the sheets under his arm, and almost turned to leave before she said she’d been meaning to track him down for weeks, wanted to pick up a flat of the drought-tolerant milkweed he grew for the pollinator garden she was planting at her cabin up Bogus Basin. He told her he didn’t have any with him that day, but he could drop them off the next afternoon if she had time. She wrote her address on a peach sticker, pressed it to the back of his work glove, and told him to bring an appetite, she’d have iced peach tea waiting.
He spent the rest of the day kicking himself, convinced he’d crossed some invisible line, that he was betraying his wife by even considering spending time alone with another woman. He almost bailed three times on the drive up the mountain the next day, his truck rattling over the dirt road to her cabin, the flat of milkweed rolling around in the bed next to a jar of wild blackberry jam he’d jarred the week before, a stupid, last-minute gift he’d almost left on the kitchen counter.
She opened the door before he could knock, wearing cutoff denim shorts and a faded Yellowstone National Park hoodie, barefoot, her dark hair streaked with gray pulled back in a messy braid. They walked out to her backyard first, tucked between stands of ponderosa pines with a clear view of the valley stretching out below, and he leaned down to point out the spot where the sun hit longest for the milkweed, their shoulders brushing when she leaned in to look too. She asked about the scar halfway through his explanation, and when he finished telling her the story of the fire, she reached out and brushed the raised edge of it with her thumb, light as a pine needle.
“That’s not something to hide,” she said, her voice soft, no pity, no awkwardness, just steady. He didn’t pull away. He leaned in, slow, like he was approaching a skittish deer, and when she didn’t step back, he kissed her, slow, unrushed, the taste of peach on her tongue, his hands resting light on her waist, hers tangling in the gray hair at the nape of his neck. The guilt didn’t hit him like he expected it to. It just melted away, like frost under the first spring sun.
They pulled away after a minute, both grinning like stupid teenagers, and she nodded at the shovel leaning against her back porch. “I figure we can plant the milkweed first,” she said, wiping a smudge of dirt off his jaw. “The cobbler I baked this morning’s still warm, but it’ll taste better after we’ve earned it.” Rafe laughed, picked up the shovel, and sank the blade into the soft, loamy dirt, the sound of her humming an old John Prine song mixing with the wind rustling through the pines.
