Rafe Marquez, 62, spent 28 years as a forest fire smokejumper before a blown ACL forced his retirement, now carves custom fly rods out of reclaimed ponderosa pine in a one-room workshop behind his cabin outside Missoula. He’s avoided all social drama for eight years, ever since his wife left him for a John Deere salesman who didn’t smell like ash and pine resin half the time, convinced he’s too set in his grumpy, routine-driven ways to make space for anyone else. He drives into town once a week, every Friday, for the VFW fish fry, sits in the same scuffed vinyl corner booth, orders the same catfish plate with extra hushpuppies and a cold Bud Light, and leaves without talking to anyone longer than it takes to pay for his food.
This particular Friday, the hall is louder than usual, half the regulars grumbling about the new county librarian who’d pushed to pull three factually inaccurate far-right political books from the teen section, calling her everything from a communist to a groomer under their breath. Rafe had ignored the chatter, focused on picking the burnt bits off his hushpuppy, when a shadow falls across his table and someone slides into the booth across from him, their denim-clad knee brushing his work boot under the table hard enough to make him jump.
He looks up, ready to tell them to beat it, that the seat’s taken, and stops. She’s got messy auburn hair twisted into a bun held together with a number two pencil, ink-stained fingers, hazel eyes crinkled at the corners like she laughs more than most people he knows, and the faint, warm scent of lavender and lemon cleaning spray hangs around her. “All the other booths are full,” she says, nodding at the packed bar, “and I’m not in the mood to get called a Marxist for the third time today while I try to eat my coleslaw.”
Rafe snorts before he can stop himself. He’d seen the petitions floating around the grocery store, heard guys ranting about her at the hardware store, and had written the whole mess off as small-town nonsense. He nods at the empty spot across from him, goes back to his fish, avoids eye contact at first, half-afraid the guys at the bar will start yelling at him too. When she reaches across the table for the bottle of white vinegar, her hand brushes his where it’s wrapped around his beer bottle, calloused from turning pages and reshelving books, and his skin tingles like he’d touched a live wire. He hasn’t felt that since before his wife left.
They start talking slow, first about the terrible coleslaw the VFW serves every week, then about the fly fishing hat she’s wearing, embroidered with the logo of the Bitterroot River Anglers Club. She says she’s looking for a custom fly rod for her dad’s 70th birthday, he’s a retired park ranger who’s been fishing the Bitterroot since he was a kid, and she can’t find anything in the local shops that feels personal enough. Rafe finds himself leaning in across the table, telling her about the reclaimed pine he uses for rod blanks, the silk thread he wraps the guides with, the way he carves a small pine tree into the handle of every rod he makes. Her knee stays pressed against his under the table, neither of them moving away.
The bubble pops when Earl, a loudmouth retired construction worker Rafe has hated since he got drunk and started a fight at the 2019 VFW reunion, slams his beer down on the edge of their booth, face red. “What the hell you doing fraternizing with this book-banning bitch, Marquez?” he slurs, glaring at her. “You gonna let her turn you into one of those liberal pussies too?”
Rafe stands up fast, his knee knocking the table hard enough to slosh beer over the edge of his bottle. He’s still 6’2, broad-shouldered, scar slashing across his left cheek from a 2017 blaze outside Kalispell, and Earl takes an involuntary step back. “Earl,” Rafe says, voice low and steady, “you’re gonna go back to your table, mind your own damn business, and apologize to her before you leave tonight, or I’ll throw you out that back door so fast your boots won’t touch the ground. We clear?”
Earl mumbles something under his breath, turns, and stomps back to the bar. Rafe sits down, his heart beating faster than it has since he jumped into a fire outside Salmon, Idaho in 2015, and finds her staring at him, cheeks pink, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. She reaches across the table, wraps her hand around his, her fingers slotting between his calloused ones, and squeezes. “No one’s stood up for me like that all month,” she says, quiet enough only he can hear.
They finish their food after that, talking about nothing and everything, until the VFW starts clearing out for the night. He walks her to her beat-up 2008 Subaru Outback parked at the edge of the lot, crisp October air stinging their cheeks, fallen maple leaves crunching under their work boots. He scribbles his cell number on a scrap of paper from his pocket, the same scrap he uses to jot down rod measurements, and hands it to her. “Come by my workshop tomorrow around 10,” he says, nodding at the highway leading out of town. “We can pick out a pine blank for your dad’s rod, maybe grab a burger at that diner off the exit after.”
She grins, tucks the scrap of paper into the pocket of her flannel shirt, and squeezes his arm, her hand warm through the thick fabric of his Carhartt jacket. She climbs into her car, rolls the window down, and waves before she pulls out of the lot. Rafe stands there for a minute, watching her taillights fade down the highway, the faint scent of lavender still clinging to his hand, and pulls his phone out to delete the photo of his ex-wife he’d kept as his lock screen for eight years.
