Jax Hale, 61, spent the last 32 years restoring vintage Ford F-100s out of a cinder block garage behind his house in southern Oregon, until he sold the business last spring to a kid fresh out of trade school. His knuckles are crisscrossed with thin white scars from slipping wrenches, his left ear has a permanent notch from a time a tree branch snapped back and caught him mid-job on a fire crew back in his 20s, and he hasn’t let anyone get close enough to call him a romantic partner since his wife left him for a real estate agent in 2011. He’s got a stubborn streak a mile wide, and he’s carried a quiet, unspoken guilt for 10 years, ever since his best friend and former hotshot crew mate Jake died in a 2013 burn over, a fire Jax walked away from with nothing but a few second-degree burns on his forearms.
He’s leaning against a split-rail fence at the town’s weekly summer beer garden when he spots her, the new librarian who moved to town three months prior, the woman he’s actively avoided talking to every time he’s dropped off donations at the library. Elara Voss, Jake’s widow. He’d recognized her immediately the first time he saw her behind the checkout desk, silver streaks weaving through her dark brown braid, the same little scar above her left eyebrow he’d seen a hundred times at cookouts at Jake and her old house outside Sacramento back in the 2000s. He’d turned right around and left the library that day, too ashamed to say hello, convinced talking to her would be some kind of betrayal to the man who’d saved his life twice on the fire line.
She’s holding a cold glass of dry rosé, laughing at a joke the bratwurst food truck owner just told, and when she tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ear her eyes lock with his across the grass. She holds the gaze for three full seconds, no look away, no awkward smile, just a slow, small tilt of her head like she’s been waiting for him to notice her. He tries to busy himself wiping condensation off his IPA can on the leg of his worn denim jeans, but when he looks up again she’s walking straight toward him, bare legs glowing gold in the late July sun, scuffed white Converse kicking up little bits of clover as she goes.
She stops so close to him he can smell jasmine and citrus perfume over the smell of grilled sausage and pine drifting off the foothills behind the beer garden. Her elbow brushes his when she leans against the fence next to him, and he tenses up so tight his knuckles go white around his beer can. She says she recognized him the second he walked into the library three weeks prior, that she’d been hoping he’d come say hello, that she loved the stack of old hotshot memoirs he’d dropped off, the ones Jake used to read out loud to her on road trips.
His throat goes dry. He’s spent 10 years replaying the day Jake died in his head, replaying every choice he made that led to him being the one to walk out, and here is the woman Jake loved, standing 12 inches away, asking him if he wants to hear the story Jake used to tell about the time Jax accidentally dyed the entire crew’s hair neon orange before a big deployment. He almost tells her he can’t, that this is wrong, that he doesn’t deserve to talk to her about Jake, about anything else. But she’s leaning in a little, her knee brushing his now, and he can see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes, the same way he could back when he’d sit across from her at Jake’s dinner table and push down the stupid, traitorous crush he’d had on her since the first time they met.
A group of kids chasing a golden retriever goes tearing past, and one of them slams into Elara’s shoulder hard enough that her rosé sloshes out of the glass, soaking the front of Jax’s dark gray work shirt. She gasps, yanking a crumpled paper napkin out of her cutoffs pocket and reaching out to dab at the wet spot right over his chest. Her palm presses flat against his sternum for half a second, warm through the thin cotton, and when she looks up their faces are six inches apart, he can smell the rosé on her breath, the mint of the gum she’s chewing.
He says it first, quiet enough only she can hear, that he’s wanted to talk to her since she moved here but he thought it would be disrespectful to Jake, that he’s carried that crush around for 15 years and never said a word because Jake was his brother. She huffs a little laugh, her hand still resting on his chest, and says she knew, that Jake knew too, that Jake used to tease her that if anything ever happened to him, she’d be stupid not to give the gruff guy with the scarred knuckles a shot. She says she moved here because she’d always loved the stories Jake told about this town, about the mountains, and she’d looked Jax up before she moved, just to see if he was still here.
He feels that 10-year weight of guilt lift off his shoulders so fast he almost sways. He asks her if she wants to ditch the beer garden, go get cheeseburgers and fries at the 24-hour diner on the edge of town, the one with the neon sign that’s been half broken since 2007. She grins, tucking that same stray piece of hair behind her ear again, and says she’d like that a lot. He brushes a pine needle off the shoulder of her linen button down, his fingers grazing the soft skin of her neck, and she shivers a little, leaning into the touch instead of pulling away.
