Arlo Mendez, 62, retired wildland fire crew supervisor, lives alone in a 1978 Airstream he gutted and refinished over three years on the edge of Deschutes National Forest outside Bend, Oregon. He hasn’t pursued so much as a coffee date since his wife Jo died of ovarian cancer eight years prior, his core flaw a stubborn refusal to let softness crack the thick skin he built over 38 years on fire lines, where hesitation or distraction could get a man killed. He only showed up to the annual county summer street fair because his 16-year-old granddaughter begged him to watch her drill team’s opening performance; she’d bailed half an hour prior to hang with friends, leaving him lingering in a 12-deep line for smoked brisket, sun beating down on the faded burn scars crisscrossing his forearms, flannel tied tight around his waist to soak up the sweat dripping down his back.
He twists the worn silver wedding band he still wears on his left ring finger out of habit when a sharp, sweet whiff of jasmine cuts through the hickory smoke and fried dough hanging thick in the 82-degree air. He turns, and there’s Lena Hart. He hasn’t seen her since 2020, right before her divorce from Jax Carter, his former crew lead and the best man at his wedding to Jo. She’s 52, still has the thin scar above her left eyebrow from the time Jax accidentally whacked her with a fishing pole on a crew camping trip 18 years prior, wearing cutoff denim shorts and a faded Fleetwood Mac t-shirt, dark hair braided over one shoulder, strands of silver glinting when she tilts her head to laugh at a toddler waving a cotton candy stick at her.
She spots him before he can look away, face lighting up, and she cuts around the end of the line to walk over. He tenses automatically, straightening his shoulders, old muscle memory from Jax chewing the crew out for slouching mid-shift. He’s always carried a quiet, unnameable tension around Lena, part guilt for never calling Jax out on his garbage treatment of her—showing up to anniversary dinners drunk, forgetting their kid’s birthday, cheating on her twice that Arlo knew of—and part a stupid, buried attraction he’d beaten down for decades out of loyalty to the crew. She stops six inches from him, close enough that he can pick up coconut sunscreen mixed with that same jasmine perfume he remembers her wearing to every crew barbecue, condensation from her iced lemonade cup dripping onto his scuffed work boot. She asks after his grandkids, asks how the Airstream remodel went, and he’s surprised she remembers that offhand comment he made at the 2019 crew Christmas party, the last one before Jax moved out.
They get their food together, claim a chipped plastic table tucked in the shade of a ponderosa pine. When they both reach for the stack of napkins on the table at the same time, their hands brush. Her knuckles are ice-cold from the lemonade, and he can feel the rough, familiar callus on her index finger, the one she gets from 12-hour days pruning at the native plant nursery she owns on the west side of town. He yanks his hand back like he touched a live wire, face heating up, absurdly flustered for a man who’s stood face-to-face with 30-foot wildfires without flinching. She smirks, teases him for still jumping like he did when Jax would sneak up behind him on the line and blow an air horn in his ear, and he laughs, the tight knot in his shoulders loosening a little as he tells her about the time Jax got stuck waist-deep in mud on the 2019 fire, had to be hauled out by a bulldozer and still threatens to fight anyone who brings it up.
Guilt nags at him the whole time they talk, though. He keeps replaying the unwritten crew rule in his head: you don’t mess with your crew lead’s ex, no matter how badly they messed up. He thinks about how Jax would lose his mind if he saw them sitting here, their knees brushing under the table every time one of them shifts, Lena leaning in when he talks like whatever he’s saying is the most interesting thing she’s heard all day. He’s halfway to making an excuse to leave, to go back to his quiet Airstream and cold beer and no messy, complicated feelings, when Lena leans forward, elbow on the table, expression soft and serious. She says she ran into Jax last month, he was in town picking up his old snowboard, brought his 28-year-old new wife who works at a ski shop in Boise. She says he looked happy, and she means it, no leftover bitterness, no hard feelings. She reaches across the table, runs a single finger along the silvery burn scar stretching from his wrist to his elbow, the one he got pushing a rookie out of the way of a falling tree on the 2017 Eagle Creek fire. She says she remembers that day, Jax came home rambling for an hour about how Arlo was the toughest, most loyal son of a bitch he’d ever met, the only man he’d ever trust to have his back.
The last of the tension drains out of him. He realizes he’s been clinging to rules that haven’t mattered for years, carrying loyalty for a man who abandoned everyone who cared about him, denying himself anything that feels good just because he thought he didn’t deserve it. He looks at her, the late afternoon gilding the edges of her hair, flecks of gold in her brown eyes, the small, hopeful smile playing on her lips, and the guilt is gone, replaced by a warm, slow buzz better than any craft beer he’s ever had. He asks what she’s doing after the fair, and she says she just got a shipment of rare alpine succulents that need potting back at the nursery, but she wouldn’t mind the extra hands. He nods, says he’d like that. They walk to her beat-up 2008 Subaru Outback, the back stacked with empty terracotta pots and burlap sacks of potting soil, he holds the passenger door open for her, and when he climbs in beside her, she reaches over the center console, laces her fingers through his, her hand warm now, no trace of the cold lemonade left. He doesn’t pull away.
