Javier Mendez, 53, spent 22 years on a wildland firefighting hotshot crew before a 2020 blaze shattered his left ankle and pushed him into early retirement. Now he runs a one-man firewood and tree trimming service out of his beat-up Ford F-150 outside Missoula, and his worst flaw is that he still refuses to let anyone get close enough to notice the faint, ash-stained tattoo of his late crew’s logo peeking out under the cuff of his flannel, still holding onto the grudge he carried after his ex-wife left him six years prior, claiming he was too tied to his work to care about her. He’s avoided the annual Milltown Fall Festival for three years running, but his niece talked him into manning a booth this October to drum up winter firewood contracts, so he’s stuck there, propped against a stack of split larch, sipping spiked spiced cider and ignoring the stares from passersby who recognize the scar slashing across his left cheek.
The air smells like fried funnel cake, pine, and damp hay from the corn maze at the edge of the fairgrounds. A bluegrass band plucks a wobbly rendition of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” from the stage 50 yards away, and kids scream as they bounce off the sides of the inflatable obstacle course next to the food trucks. He’s just about to pack up early when she walks up, and he recognizes her instantly: Lila Hale, wife of the county commissioner who’d cut the local wildland firefighting budget two years in a row and wrote Javier a $120 fine for cutting three dead pines on public land last spring without a permit.
She’s wearing a cream cable-knit sweater that fits tight across her shoulders, faded high-waisted jeans, and work boots caked in mud from the corn maze, her dark hair pulled back in a loose braid that has a single piece of corn husk stuck in the end. She leans in to tap the top of a larch round on the stack in front of him, her knuckles brushing his calloused hand where it rests on the wood, and he can smell vanilla lotion mixed with the tart apple cider in the plastic cup she’s holding. “You’re Javier, right?” she says, and her voice is lower than he expected, rougher, like she spends half her time yelling over wind or loud machinery.
He tenses up immediately, ready to snap back about the fine, ready to tell her to go back to her husband’s fancy booth by the beer tent. But then she laughs, soft, and nods at the scar on his cheek. “I saw you pull that tabby cat out of the 60-foot ponderosa on our road last month. My husband said you were wasting your time, but I thought it was the nicest thing I’d seen anyone do all year.” She holds his gaze for three full beats, longer than a stranger would, longer than a married woman should, and he feels his jaw unclench before he can stop it.
She tells him she’s looking for three cords of larch for her mother’s cabin, tucked back in the woods behind her and her husband’s property, and that her husband has no idea the cabin’s furnace died last week. “He says we should just ship my mom to a nursing home in town,” she says, rolling her eyes, and she shifts closer, her shoulder almost brushing his, so no one walking past can hear what she’s saying. “I told him to go to hell. I’m fixing the furnace, and I’m stocking the cabin with wood so she can stay there as long as she wants.”
Javier knows he should say no. He hates her husband, hates the way the guy grandstands for local news while former firefighters he used to work with can’t afford their medical bills. But she’s leaning in, her eyes bright, and when she reaches up to brush a stray pine needle off the shoulder of his flannel, her fingers linger on the hard muscle of his bicep for a full second, warm through the thin fabric. He feels that familiar twist in his gut, the pull between disgust at the idea of getting tangled up with a married woman, the quiet thrill of being seen by someone who didn’t just look at him and see a scar and a beat-up truck and a fine for cutting trees.
He asks her when she wants him to come look at the cabin to measure how much wood they can stack by the furnace. She says tomorrow morning at 8, that her husband’s driving to Helena for a state county commissioners’ meeting and won’t be back until late that night. She pulls her phone out to type her number into his, and he notices she’s not wearing her wedding ring, just a thin silver band with a tiny turquoise stone on her right index finger. When she hands his phone back, her thumb brushes the back of his hand, and she gives him a small, secret smile before she turns to walk back toward the corn maze, the corn husk still stuck in her braid.
He packs up his booth 20 minutes later, turns down three offers for firewood contracts because he’s too busy replaying the way her fingers felt on his arm, the way she didn’t flinch when he told her the story of how he got the scar, fighting the Lolo Peak fire in 2017. He stops at the grocery store on the way home to pick up a new tape measure, the old one having broken last week, and buys a pack of the peppermint hard candy he remembers his mom used to keep in the truck when he was a kid.
The next morning is crisp, the grass crusted with thin white frost, the sky a pale, cloudless blue. He pulls up to the cabin at 7:58, his truck kicking up dust on the dirt road, and sees her leaning against the porch rail, holding two chipped ceramic mugs of coffee, the sun hitting the side of her face so he can see the faint freckles across her nose. He grabs the new tape measure from the passenger seat, shoves the pack of peppermints in his jacket pocket, and steps out of the truck, the frost crunching loud under his steel-toe work boots.
