Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 22 years as a smokejumper before a blown ACL and a widowhood he never recovered from pushed him into running a small wildfire mitigation firm outside Missoula. His biggest flaw, per his only remaining sister, is that he’d rather spend three nights alone fixing a broken chainsaw than attend a single community event, even if the event serves free huckleberry lager and the best brisket west of the Continental Divide. He’d only showed up to the county fair beer garden that night because his newest client had insisted, and he couldn’t afford to turn down a $40k contract to fireproof a 200-acre ranch outside Lolo.
He was halfway through his second lager, ignoring the line dancing crowd and scrolling through photos of recent burn scars on his phone, when someone slid onto the bench across from him, their knee brushing his under the splintered pine table hard enough to make him spill a few drops of beer on his worn Carhartt sleeve. The cold liquid seeped through the thin fabric, chilling his forearm, and he looked up ready to snap, the words dying in his throat before they could leave his mouth. She had the same crinkly, lopsided smile as his late wife, Ellie, the same thick auburn streak running through her dark hair, but she wasn’t Ellie. It was Maeve Carter, Ellie’s baby cousin, the kid he’d carried out of a flooded backcountry cabin when she was 19, the one who’d moved to Portland right after Ellie’s funeral and hadn’t been back in 12 years.
She laughed when he stared, leaning forward so the warm yellow string lights strung above the tables caught the silver hoops in her ears, the smell of pine resin and lavender laundry detergent drifting across the table to him, sharp and warm at the same time. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, sliding a crumpled paper napkin across the table to him. His fingers brushed hers when he took it, and he jolted like he’d touched a live wire. Her hands were calloused, rough around the knuckles, crisscrossed with tiny thin scars from thorns and shovel handles, not the soft, manicured hands he remembered from when she was a college kid interning at Glacier National Park.
He fumbled for something to say, half-embarrassed, half-ready to grab his jacket and run. This felt wrong, like he was breaking some unspoken rule he’d written for himself the day Ellie’s casket was lowered into the ground, the one that said he never got to want anything or anyone again, especially not someone tied so tightly to the life he’d lost. He mumbled a gruff greeting, asked her when she’d moved back, kept his eyes fixed on the sticky edge of the table like it held the answer to every dumb, messy thought bouncing around his head.
She told him she’d moved back three months prior, bought a small plot of land outside Stevensville to run a native plant nursery, focused on fire-resistant species that regrow quickly after burn events. She’d seen his name on the list of local mitigation consultants, she said, had almost called him a dozen times but didn’t want to dig up old grief he’d probably rather leave buried. She tapped his wrist with her index finger when a siren blared past the fairgrounds, a fire truck heading west toward the Bitterroot Mountains, and he realized she’d remembered that the sound of fire sirens still made his shoulders tense up, a leftover muscle memory from 20 years of jumping out of planes into burning forests. No one else remembered that, not anymore.
He looked up at her then, and she was holding his gaze, no pity in her eyes, just the same teasing glint she’d had when she was 19 and snuck warm beer into his and Ellie’s backcountry campsite. The twang of the country band playing off to the side faded to low background noise, the cold weight of the beer bottle in his hand, the rough splinter of the table under his palm, the heat of her leg still pressed against his under the table all felt sharper, more real than anything he’d felt in eight years. He wanted to lean across the table and touch the tiny pine tree tattoo peeking out above the collar of her flannel, wanted to ask her if she still liked her coffee black with two sugars, wanted to apologize for not calling her after Ellie died, for letting that whole side of his life disappear the second the funeral ended.
He told her he’d seen photos of her nursery on Facebook, that he’d almost reached out a dozen times too, that he’d been scared it would feel like he was betraying Ellie by talking to her. She smiled, soft this time, no teasing, and shifted closer, her shoulder brushing his now that she’d leaned halfway across the table. “Ellie would’ve yelled at you for being so stupid,” she said, and he laughed, a real, rumbling laugh, the kind that made his chest ache a little. She was right. Ellie had always told him he was too stubborn for his own good, that he needed to stop wallowing and live his life even when things sucked so bad he could barely breathe.
They talked for another hour, until the beer garden crew started stacking folding chairs and turning off the string lights one by one, the fairground slowly going quiet around them. She asked him if he wanted to get coffee at the 24-hour diner down the road, the same one he and Ellie used to go to after late night fire callouts, when they were both too wired to sleep. He hesitated for half a second, then nodded, grabbing his frayed denim jacket off the back of the bench. She stood up next to him, her hand brushing his elbow as they walked toward the exit, the cool August air hitting their faces, the sound of crickets chirping in the alfalfa fields surrounding the fairgrounds loud in the quiet between them. He held the diner door open for her when they pulled into the parking lot ten minutes later, and when she stepped past him, her hair brushed his jaw, and he let himself breathe easy for the first time in years.
