Manny Ruiz, 53, retired smokejumper turned wildfire mitigation consultant, is packing up his folding display after a neighborhood fire safety fair held in the back of Boise’s most popular craft beer garden. The sun dips low, painting the foothills soft pink, and the first trivia night regulars trickle in, coolers slung over shoulders, scruffy dogs trotting at their heels. He cracks open a hazy IPA he grabbed from the bar earlier, the cold aluminum stinging the thick calluses on his palms, citrusy hop fumes cutting through the air’s mix of grilled bratwurst and pine from the fir trees lining the fence line. A scar cuts jagged across his left jaw, leftover from the 2018 blaze that killed three members of his crew, the fire he still blames himself for even though every official report said the wind shift was impossible to predict. He’s spent the five years since closing himself off from casual intimacy, convinced he doesn’t deserve anything good, stubborn to a fault about letting anyone get close enough to see how much he still hurts.
Lena Hale walks over holding a paper plate stacked high with leftover brisket sliders from the event caterer. She’s 48, married to the city’s first-term progressive councilman, works part time at the downtown public library, and Manny has actively avoided her for three months, ever since they sat next to each other at a city planning meeting and she laughed so hard at his joke about the council’s absurdly lax brush clearance rules that she snort-laughed into her iced coffee. The entire city has been whispering for months that her husband is cheating on her with his 26-year-old communications director, but Manny has never mentioned it, hates getting tangled up in other people’s messy public lives. She slides into the picnic bench across from him, and her bare knee brushes his denim-clad thigh, warm through the fabric. She doesn’t move away.
He can smell jasmine perfume mixed with the coconut sunscreen she wears, hears the faint jingle of the tiny silver book charm on her necklace when she leans forward to grab a slider for herself. She mentions she saw his post on the local hiking group Facebook page the day before, the series of photos of the 1950s fire lookout he’s been restoring on weekends up in the Sawtooths. She says she’s begged someone to take her up to one of those lookouts for years, but her husband hates hiking, calls it “a waste of time he could be spending fundraising.” Manny tenses up at the mention of her husband, takes a long sip of his beer. He knows if anyone sees them sitting this close, the gossip mill will be spinning by sunrise, knows he’ll get dragged into the mess of her failing marriage, something he’s spent years actively avoiding. He’s halfway to making an excuse to pack up and leave when she reaches across the table to brush a fleck of brisket off his chin, her thumb grazing the thick raised scar on his jaw. Her skin is soft, warmer than he expected, and he freezes, can’t look away from her dark brown eyes, crinkled at the corners like she smiles a lot when no one’s forcing her to perform as the perfect politician’s wife.
She tells him she’s tired of pretending. Tired of grinning for gala photos when she knows her husband is texting his mistress under the table, tired of lying to her friends when they ask if everything’s okay, tired of feeling like she’s just a campaign prop. She says she saw the photos of the lookout, the way the sun hits the valley floor from 7,000 feet up, and she knew she had to go there, even if it’s just once, even if people talk. The tight knot that’s been sitting in Manny’s chest for five years loosens a little, and for the first time in as long as he can remember, he doesn’t feel the urge to run. He tells her he’s heading up to the lookout at dawn the next day to fix a cracked glass panel in the upper observation deck, that he’s already got a cooler packed with lemonade and the peanut butter chocolate chip cookies he saw her eat three of at the last council meeting, and she can come if she wants. She grins so bright it makes his chest feel light, leans in so close he can taste the peach hard seltzer she’s been drinking on her breath when she says she’ll be at the trailhead at 5:45, that she’ll tell her husband she’s going to a yoga retreat with her sister in Sun Valley, no one will ask questions.
He drives home that night, his fingers still tingling where her thumb brushed his scar, and for the first time in five years, he doesn’t lie awake replaying the 2018 fire on loop in his head. He wakes 20 minutes before his alarm, pulls on his scuffed work boots, shoves an extra wool blanket in the back of his beat-up Ford F-150 just in case it’s cold up at the lookout. He gets to the trailhead five minutes early, leans against the truck hood sipping black coffee, watching the sky turn pale pink over the mountain peaks. He sees her silver Subaru pull up 30 seconds later, her hair pulled back in a messy braid, no makeup, worn hiking boots on her feet, grinning so wide her cheeks are flushed. He opens the passenger door for her, she climbs in, sets her small backpack on the floorboard, and rests her hand lightly on his thigh when he shifts the truck into drive to head up the rutted dirt road leading to the lookout.
