Marlon Pruitt, 59, retired smokejumper turned wildfire mitigation consultant, only showed up to the Bonner County fire department picnic because his 72-year-old neighbor left three voice messages threatening to leave her cantankerous senior cat at his garage if he skipped. He’d spent the last eight years avoiding this kind of small-town noise ever since his wife died, preferring the quiet of his mountaintop property where the only sounds were wind through ponderosa pines and the snarl of the vintage chainsaws he restored in his spare time. He leaned against a rough-barked pine at the edge of the field, lukewarm Pabst in one hand, scanning the crowd for the fastest exit, when she stepped into his line of sight.
She was Elara Voss, the new county extension agent who’d moved to town three months prior, and he’d only seen her from a distance before, hauling saplings out of her beat-up Ford F-150 at the hardware store. She walked straight for him, work boots dusted with topsoil, sun-bleached auburn hair pulled back in a loose braid, and stopped close enough that he could smell lavender sunscreen and the sharp, sweet tang of blackberry jam on the corner of her mouth. “You’re the guy who wrote that scathing letter to the editor about people planting Douglas firs two feet from their deck joists, right?” she said, grinning, and he huffed a laugh he didn’t expect. She leaned in, shoulder brushing his bicep, to point at a man in a neon fishing shirt flipping burgers across the field. “That guy right there planted three last month. I tried to tell him he’s one stray campfire away from losing his entire house, and he said I was ‘fearmongering for the liberal tree agenda.’”
Her shoulder stayed pressed to his for three full seconds before she pulled back, and Marlon’s throat went dry. He hadn’t been this close to anyone who wasn’t a client asking a quick work question in years, and part of him wanted to step back, to retreat to his truck, to go back to the quiet that had felt safe for so long. Part of him felt sharp, hot guilt, like he was betraying the memory of his wife, like he was too old to be chasing some silly spark he thought was long dead, and he almost turned to walk away right then. The other part, the part he thought died when his wife’s memorial service ended, couldn’t stop staring at the flecks of gold in her hazel eyes, the faint scar along her left cheekbone she got when she fell off a horse as a kid, she told him, when he asked. When she reached out to hand him a pulled pork slider someone had pressed into her free hand, their fingers brushed, and he felt the callus on her index finger, worn smooth from years of holding pruning shears, and he had to fight the urge to wrap his hand around hers entirely.
They talked for 45 minutes, the noise of the picnic fading into background static: kids screaming on the bounce house, the crackle of the charcoal grill, the fire chief yelling into a megaphone about the dunk tank fundraiser. She teased him about the fact he still wore his old scuffed smokejumper boots, caked with ash from a job he’d done the week prior, and he teased her about the pocket knife she pulled out to cut a stray thread off her flannel, which had a sparkly unicorn painted on the handle, a gift from her 12-year-old niece, she said. When the fire chief announced anyone who could hit the dunk tank target three times in a row won a $50 gift card to the local bait shop, she nudged his arm. “Bet the big bad smokejumper can’t hit it once,” she said, grinning, and he rolled his eyes, but he walked over to the line anyway.
He hit the target twice, missed the third by an inch, so he volunteered to get in the tank instead, just to make her laugh. The water was ice cold, snowmelt from the Bitterroots, and when he climbed out, dripping wet, hair stuck to his forehead, she was standing right there, holding a threadbare cotton towel, laughing so hard her cheeks were bright pink. She reached up without hesitation, brushing a wet strand of hair off his forehead, her palm warm against his cool skin, and every last bit of resistance he’d clung to for eight years melted right there.
He asked her if she wanted to come back to his shop later, to see the collection of 1960s chainsaws he was restoring, to have a beer that wasn’t lukewarm, and she said yes, no hesitation. He scrawled his address on a crumpled napkin he pulled out of his jeans pocket, and she tucked it into the pocket of her work flannel, her fingers brushing his again when she took it. He watched her walk back to her truck to drop off the stack of oak sapling pamphlets she’d been carrying, the late August sun painting the sky pink and orange behind her, and he took a sip of his beer, which had gone warm again, but it didn’t taste half bad.
