Manny Ruiz is 57, spent 32 years on wildland fire crews across the west, retired three years prior after a burn on his left leg left him with a limp that flairs up when the weather turns cold. He’s stubborn to a fault, still sleeps on the same lumpy mattress he brought with him when he moved to Missoula after his wife died of ovarian cancer eight years back, refuses to let anyone help him haul the vintage fire hoses he restores and sells at the local farmers market, even when his leg throbs so bad he can barely climb the steps to his workshop. The only non-work commitment he keeps is the weekly Friday fish fry at the VFW post off Reserve Street, and that’s mostly out of habit, not any desire to chat with the other guys who yell about football and gripe about property taxes for three hours straight.
The second week of October, the post is packed tighter than he’s ever seen it, the air thick with the smell of fried cod, cheap draft beer, and pine needles tracked in on everyone’s boots from the recent windstorm. He’s slid into his usual corner booth, half done with his first beer, when a shadow falls across the table, and he looks up to see Clara Marlow, the new county librarian, holding a paper plate piled high with coleslaw and hushpuppies. All the other booths are full, she says, tilting her head toward the crowd of guys yelling at the football game playing on the crummy old TV above the bar, and he nods before he can think better of it, tells her she can sit.
She slides into the booth across from him, her chunky knit cream sweater brushing his forearm as she settles, and he catches a whiff of lavender hand lotion and lemon polish, the kind he used to see on the library shelves when he’d drop off books his wife had finished back when they lived in Boise. She’s 38, married to the county sheriff, everyone in town knows that, has a 17 year old daughter who plays volleyball at the high school, and Manny’s first thought is that he shouldn’t be talking to her, that the guys at the bar will start running their mouths by the end of the night, that he’s old enough to be her dad for Christ’s sake.
He doesn’t get up to leave, though. She laughs when he complains that the cod is overcooked for the third week running, says she only comes for the hushpuppies anyway, and her laugh is warm, a little rough around the edges, like she’s been drinking too much iced coffee or smoking the occasional cigarette when no one’s looking. She mentions she saw his fire hose display at the farmers market the previous Saturday, spent ten minutes running her hand over the braided rubber ones from the 70s, loves the way the worn fabric feels, the history of them. When she passes him the ketchup bottle across the table, their fingers brush, and Manny feels a jolt go up his arm, the kind he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager sneaking into drive-in movies with his high school girlfriend.
He fights the urge to yank his hand back, fights the wave of disgust that rolls through him first—what the hell is he doing, flirting with a married woman half his age, a woman married to a guy he’s shared a beer with at this very post half a dozen times? But she’s leaning forward now, her hazel eyes flecked with gold holding his gaze longer than polite, no ring on her left hand, and she says her and the sheriff have been sleeping in separate bedrooms for six months, that he’s been cheating on her with a 26 year old deputy, that she’s only staying in the house until their daughter graduates in the spring.
Her knee brushes his under the table, and he doesn’t pull away. She says she’s been watching him for weeks, sitting alone in this booth, not talking to anyone, not trying to perform toughness for the crowd like all the other guys here, and she likes that. When she leaves, she slips a scrap of paper with her phone number on it under his beer coaster, tells him she knows his workshop is out off Miller Creek Road, right? She’ll be there tomorrow at two, when the sheriff is at a training in Bozeman for the whole day.
He sits there for an hour after she leaves, staring at the scrap of paper, half convinced he imagined the whole thing. He throws the paper away twice, then digs it out of the trash both times, his leg throbbing worse than it has all month.
The next afternoon is sunny, crisp, the aspen trees lining the road to his workshop glowing bright gold. He’s halfway through sanding a 1978 Forest Service hose when he hears the knock on the door, and when he opens it, she’s standing there holding a paper bag of chocolate chip cookies, still wearing that same cream sweater, no makeup on, her hair pulled back in a loose braid. She steps inside, looks around at the hoses hung on the walls, the smell of rubber and pine sol thick in the air, and runs her hand along the half-sanded hose on the workbench, says she wants one exactly like that for the apartment she’s renting once she moves out.
Manny steps toward her, his boots scuffing the concrete floor, and tucks a stray strand of hair that’s fallen loose from her braid behind her ear. She leans into his touch, her cheek warm against his calloused palm, and doesn’t look away.
