Ray Voss, 62, retired forest fire spotter, had avoided the Truckee summer street fair for 18 straight months. He’d spent those days holed up in his cabin 12 miles up the mountain, fixing fence, chopping wood, and pretending the sympathy casseroles his neighbors left on his porch didn’t exist. His biggest flaw? He’d clung so tight to the memory of his wife, gone sudden from a heart attack in the lookout tower they’d shared for 30 years, that he’d convinced himself even smiling at another person was a betrayal. He’d only dragged himself down the mountain that afternoon because his old forest service partner had left a custom wide-brimmed fire hat he’d ordered three months prior at the fair’s hat booth, and he hated the thought of the guy wasting his money.
He wore his faded 2018 fire season flannel even with the sun sitting at 76 degrees, collar popped, hat pulled low to avoid eye contact with anyone who might stop him to ask how he was holding up. The fair smelled like fried oreos, pine, and charcoal grills, noise bouncing off the storefronts of downtown: kids screaming, country music leaking from a bar speaker, the low rumble of a pickup truck passing by. He was 50 feet from the hat booth when a wave of heat hit him, thick and familiar, like the controlled burns he’d overseen every spring for decades. He stopped, against his better judgment, and turned toward the source.
The booth was a glassblowing setup, a small furnace glowing orange behind a metal guard, a woman with silver streaks pulled back in a braid leaning over a workbench, shaping a lump of molten glass at the end of a long iron punty. Her forearms were dusted with fine white glass powder, crisscrossed with small burn scars, and she had a sticker of a fire lookout tower stuck to the side of the neon cooler next to her feet. Ray froze, half embarrassed to be staring, half furious at himself for even noticing her. He’d told himself a hundred times he’d never let anyone else in, that the hole his wife left was too big to fill, that any interest he felt in someone new was a slap to the 32 years they’d spent together.
She looked up before he could turn away, held his gaze for three full beats longer than casual politeness allowed, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a smirk that didn’t feel pitying, didn’t feel pushy, just felt like she knew exactly what he was thinking. He shifted his weight, boot catching on a stack of split oak next to the booth, and stumbled forward, hand shooting out to catch himself on the edge of the workbench. His palm brushed hers where she held the punty, and both of them flinched: her hand was warm from the iron, calloused at the fingertips, his rough from 40 years of climbing tower ladders and handling axe handles. The molten glass on the end of the rod swayed, glowing bright as a campfire ember.
“Whoa, easy there,” she said, laughing, a low, rough sound that didn’t sound like she was making fun of him. “Don’t go sending 1200 degree glass through the cotton candy stand. We’d have a real mess on our hands.”
Ray mumbled an apology, already mentally kicking himself for making a fool of himself, but she didn’t let him walk away. She nodded at the patch on his flannel, the faded US Forest Service logo stitched to the chest. “You a spotter? My dad did that for 27 years outside Bend. I spent half my childhood perched on the counter of his tower, eating cheetos and watching him radio in smoke columns.”
He sat down on a cinder block next to the booth before he could talk himself out of it. They talked for 47 minutes, he counted, though he didn’t mean to. The furnace rumbled low under their conversation, the same low thrum as the fire tanker planes he used to radio in when a blaze got out of hand, and the air around them smelled like burnt sugar and hot metal. She told him about the time she’d dropped a 10 pound glass sculpture into a bucket of cold water and it exploded, sending shards into her hair that she found for three weeks after. He told her about the pine marten that broke into his and his wife’s tower one winter and stole every last pack of peanut butter crackers they had stored for the season, and she laughed so hard she snort-laughed, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist.
He didn’t even notice when a group of his old forest service buddies walked past, hooting and waving at him, until they were gone. He didn’t care that strangers were walking by, glancing at them, no one stopped to ask him how he was holding up. When she finished shaping the glass pinecone she’d been working on when he walked up, she held it out to him, still warm through the thick work glove she wore. “For you,” she said. No charge, no strings, just a little thing shaped like the pinecones he’d kicked around the catwalk of his tower for decades.
He hesitated for half a second, that old guilt curling in his chest, the voice in his head saying he didn’t deserve to feel this light, this seen, after losing his wife. Then he remembered what his wife had said to him two weeks before she died, when they were watching a sunset from the tower: “You’re too damn stubborn for your own good, Ray Voss. When I’m gone, you better not sit up here rotting away. You go have fun. You go talk to pretty girls. I’ll tease you about it when you get here.” He took the pinecone, his bare fingers brushing hers over the edge of the glove, and neither of them pulled away for a full two seconds, the heat from the glass seeping into his palm like something waking up after a long, cold winter.
He asked her if she wanted to get a beer at the dive bar down the street after she closed up her booth, his voice rougher than he meant it to be, and she nodded, grinning, scribbling her phone number on a scrap of brown craft paper before tucking it into the breast pocket of his flannel, her knuckles brushing his chest through the fabric. “I’m done in an hour,” she said. “Don’t be late.”
He walked the rest of the way to the hat booth, the glass pinecone warm and heavy in the front pocket of his jeans, the scrap of paper crinkling against his chest when he breathed. The hat booth owner handed him his new wide-brimmed hat, still stiff with new leather, and Ray didn’t even roll his eyes when the guy winked and said he’d seen him talking to the glassblower. He put the hat on, adjusted the brim so the sun hit his face just right, and turned toward the bar to find a seat by the open window, so he could see her when she walked over.
