Rafe Mendez, 52, retired wildland fire crew supervisor, had avoided the weekly downtown beer garden for three straight months before his old crew partner physically dragged him there the second week of July. The air smelled like charred pine from the controlled burn his former team had wrapped three days prior, mixed with grilled bratwurst and the sour tang of hoppy IPA, and the low twang of a local country cover band hummed over the chatter of 200 or so town residents, all gathered to raise money for families displaced by the spring wildfire that had chewed through 12,000 acres of nearby forest. He’d spent the morning under the hood of a 1978 Ford F-150 he was restoring for a rancher up in the hills, so his work boots were still caked with red dirt, his faded gray fire crew hoodie had a grease stain on the left cuff, and he’d forgotten to shave for four days, the stubble on his jaw coarse enough to sand wood.
He’d planned to grab one beer, thank the crew for their work on the burn, and bolt back to his quiet ranch house 15 minutes outside town, until he got to the drink line and saw her. She was the new county librarian, he’d seen her around the post office a handful of times, but never this close. She had a smattering of freckles across her nose, was wearing a faded Dolly Parton t-shirt under a canvas apron printed with old book covers, and her dark hair was pulled back in a messy braid that fell over one shoulder. When it was his turn to order, she smiled, grabbed a frosted mug from the stack under the table, and filled it with the hazy IPA he pointed to. Their fingers brushed when she handed it over, her skin warm and soft against his calloused knuckles, and he felt a jolt run up his arm that had nothing to do with the 120-volt battery he’d messed with two days prior. He mumbled a thank you, turned, and found a rickety picnic table at the far edge of the crowd, determined to ignore the weird flutter in his chest he hadn’t felt since his ex-wife left him eight years earlier.
He was three sips into his beer, scrolling through old fire crew photos on his phone, when she slid into the bench across from him, set a paper plate piled with potato salad and a pickled bratwurst in front of him, and said the kid passing out free plates had skipped his whole section. She sat for a minute, leaning forward a little so she could hear him over the band, and said she recognized the logo on his hoodie—her older brother had been on a wildland fire crew in northern California, had died in the 2020 August Complex fires. He tensed up at first, ready to shut down the conversation before it got too personal, but there was no pity in her eyes, just a quiet kind of understanding, so he found himself talking. He told her about the worst fire he’d ever worked, the time a gust of wind had shifted so fast his crew had to huddle in a burned out clearing for six hours waiting for air support, about how he’d retired after he fell off a fire line the year before and broke his ankle, about how fixing old trucks was the only thing that kept him from going crazy sitting alone in his house.
She shifted in her seat at one point, moving out of the way of a group of kids chasing each other with water guns, and her knee brushed his under the table. He didn’t move away. She held eye contact when he talked about his ex-wife leaving, no judgment, no awkward platitudes about how he’d find someone else, just nodded and said she’d left her own abusive ex-husband three years before moving to town, that she knew what it felt like to not want to let anyone get close. The sun dipped below the hills as they talked, the string lights strung between the oak trees flickered on, and then the wind picked up, fast, carrying the sharp smell of incoming rain.
The storm hit so quick everyone scrambled to pack up the coolers and fold up the tables before everything got soaked. Rafe grabbed a crate of empty beer mugs off the table she was working at, carried it back to the library’s pop-up tent with her, and before they could turn around to grab another load, the rain poured down, hard enough to soak through his hoodie in 10 seconds. They huddled under the narrow overhang at the edge of the tent, shoulders pressed tight together, rain dripping off the brim of his worn baseball cap onto her forearm. She laughed, wiping the drop off with her other hand, and said she hadn’t gotten caught in a summer rainstorm like that since she was a kid sneaking out to the lake with her brother. Rafe didn’t overthink it, didn’t talk himself out of it like he’d done a hundred times before. He lifted his hand, brushed a strand of wet hair that had fallen in her face back behind her ear, and told her he was glad his buddy had dragged him out that night. She smiled, leaned into his touch for half a second, before they heard her co-worker yelling her name from the other side of the square, waving a tarp over his head.
The rain slowed to a light drizzle five minutes later. She scribbled her phone number on the back of a crumpled library checkout receipt, pushed it into his hand, and said she’d been asking about him for weeks, that her 1999 Toyota Tacoma had been sputtering for months and she’d heard he was the best mechanic in the county for old vehicles. He tucked the receipt into the inner pocket of his hoodie, watched her walk off to help her co-worker load the last of the supplies into the library’s minivan. He took a sip of his now warm beer, leaned back against the tent pole, and already had a mental list of parts he’d need to pick up at the auto shop before she brought the truck by next Saturday.
