Roy Pacheco, 59, leans against the scuffed oak bar of The Rusty Spur, calloused fingers curled around a cold Coors Banquet. He’d avoided the annual volunteer fire department barbecue fundraiser for three years running, but his old crew had showed up at his cabin at 10 a.m. with a six pack and a guilt trip about how much the department needed new gear for the upcoming wildfire season, so he’d caved. A thin scar slices across his left forearm, souvenir of the 2017 Cascadia blaze that burned 120,000 acres and put him in the hospital for three weeks, and he tugs the sleeve of his faded crew hoodie down half an inch when a group of tourist moms glance his way. The air smells like hickory smoke, beer foam, and the sweet, sticky tang of barbecue sauce slathered on brisket that’s been smoking since 2 a.m., and Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” hums low from the jukebox in the corner. He’s got one foot out the door already, planning to slip out before the stupid charity auction starts, when he turns to set his empty bottle down and collides with someone carrying a tray of sliders.
One slider slips off the edge of the plastic tray, and he catches it mid-fall, his palm brushing the back of the woman’s hand as she fumbles to steady the rest. She laughs, warm and loud, not the high, fake giggle he’s gotten used to from the single women in town who see him as a sad, fixer-upper widower. She introduces herself as Elena Marquez, 48, the new county agricultural extension agent who moved up from rural Nevada three months prior, and he recognizes her immediately—he’d seen her hauling bales of alfalfa at the feed store two weeks prior, covered in hay dust, yelling at a guy who was trying to sell her expired horse wormer. Her nails are chipped, stained dark with pine sap, and she’s wearing scuffed steel-toe work boots instead of the sundresses most women wear to the fundraiser, and when she leans in closer to talk over the roar of the crowd, her shoulder presses firm against his bicep, and he can smell lavender shampoo mixed with the faint, familiar scent of campfire smoke in her hair. He tenses up at first, used to keeping at least three feet of space between himself and anyone who isn’t an old crew member, and half expects the gossips at the next table to start whispering, but she doesn’t pull away, just asks him about the scar peeking out from his hoodie sleeve, no pity in her eyes, just curiosity.
He tells her the story of the 2017 blaze, not the watered down version he gives strangers, the real one, about how he ran back into the fire to pull a 19 year old rookie out when his oxygen tank failed, and how he’d gotten trapped under a falling cedar for 45 minutes before the rest of the crew found him. She listens, no interruptions, nods when he says he still has nightmares sometimes, still can’t sleep if the house is too quiet. He’s halfway through telling her about the morel mushrooms that pop up in the burn scars a year after a fire, when the auctioneer taps the mic and yells that the last item up for bid is a guided foraging hike for two, led by Elena, through the 2022 Deschutes burn scar to hunt for morels. The crowd whoops, and a couple of the younger guys start bidding, teasing each other about getting lost in the woods with the pretty new extension agent. Roy’s first instinct is to look away, to pretend he doesn’t care, but Elena glances over at him, raises one dark eyebrow, and grins, like she’s daring him to do it.
He bids before he can talk himself out of it, first $100, then $150, then $220, when the other guys drop out, laughing and slapping his back when the auctioneer yells that he’s won. His old crew hoots and catcalls from the other end of the bar, and he flips them off, his face hot, when he walks over to Elena to get the details. She hands him a crumpled piece of notebook paper, with the trailhead address, 6 a.m. meeting time, and her cell number scrawled in messy blue ink at the bottom, and when she passes it to him, her fingers linger on his for half a second longer than necessary, her dark eyes soft. “I’ve been asking about you for weeks,” she says, quiet enough that no one else can hear, “I heard you knew more about burn scar ecology than anyone else in the county. Was hoping you’d bid.” He admits he’d seen her at the feed store, had even hung around an extra 20 minutes hoping she’d talk to him, but had been too much of a coward to say hi first, and she laughs again, so loud the gossips at the next table glance over.
He shows up to the trailhead 10 minutes early the next Saturday, a thermos of black coffee tucked in his backpack, wicker foraging basket slung over his shoulder. The air is crisp, sharp with the smell of pine and damp earth, and the sky is pale pink, just starting to lighten over the Cascade foothills. Elena is already there, leaning against the back of her beat-up Subaru, holding a second thermos, and she tosses him a pack of homemade jerky when he walks up. He takes it, their knuckles brushing as their hands meet, and he notices she’s wearing the same faded fire department hoodie he’d left hanging over the back of his chair when he left the fundraiser the night before. He smiles, a real smile, the kind he hasn’t let show since his wife died, no self-consciousness, no worry about what the people in town will say when they see them coming back from the hike together. He adjusts the strap of his backpack, steps onto the trail beside her, and lets the quiet crunch of pine needles under their boots drown out every last stupid worry he’d carried around for the last eight years.
