Roland Voss, 53, spent 18 years as a smokejumper before a 2013 blaze in the Bitterroot Mountains left him with a pale, ropey scar snaking up his left forearm and a permanent limp that worsens when the weather turns cold. He now works as a part-time wildfire mitigation consultant, mostly taking calls from out-of-state landowners, and has avoided every small-town community event in Darby, Montana, for the last eight years, ever since his ex-wife packed her SUV and drove to Boise without leaving a note. The only reason he showed up to the fire department’s annual cookout fundraiser was that his old jump crew captain had called in a favor, and Roland doesn’t owe many people favors he doesn’t pay back.
He’s leaning against a splintered pine picnic table, sweating through the faded Grayback Mountain Trail Crew shirt he’s had since he was 22, holding a sweating can of Pabst that he’s barely touched, when she walks up. She’s a few inches shorter than him, auburn hair pulled back in a loose braid, freckles dusting her nose and the tops of her bare shoulders, wearing a well-worn denim shirt tied at the waist and frayed cutoff shorts that show off a tiny constellation of tattooed stars behind her left knee. She asks if there are any cheeseburgers left on the grill, her voice low and warm, like she’s used to speaking softly in quiet rooms.
He nods, grabs one off the platter next to him, and they both reach for the stack of paper napkins at the same time. Their knuckles brush, and he feels the rough, familiar callus on the pad of her middle finger, the kind you get from turning thousands of book pages over decades. She smells like lavender laundry soap and the charcoal smoke curling off the grill, and something tight in his chest loosens for half a second before he remembers where he knows her from. Clara McKinnon. His ex-wife’s second cousin. He’d only met her once, at his wedding 19 years prior, when she was 19, quiet, wearing a too-bright yellow sundress, hiding in the back of the reception hall reading a paperback while everyone else danced.
He doesn’t say anything at first, just hands her the napkin, and she thanks him, leaning against the picnic table a foot away from him, close enough that he can feel the heat coming off her sun-warmed skin when the breeze shifts. She mentions she’s the new part-time librarian at the town’s tiny public library, moved to Darby six months prior after her husband died of a sudden heart attack, was looking for somewhere quiet to start over. She says she’s been trying to track him down for weeks, wants to set up a series of talks for local kids about wildfire safety, about what it’s like to be a smokejumper.
Roland tenses up, rubbing the scar on his forearm like he always does when he’s uncomfortable. He doesn’t do talks, doesn’t like being around crowds of kids, doesn’t like answering questions about the scars, about the friends he lost on jumps, about why his marriage fell apart. And on top of that, she’s his ex’s family. That’s a line he never thought he’d even consider crossing, feels wrong, like he’s breaking some unspoken rule even if the divorce was finalized eight years ago, even if he hasn’t spoken to his ex in seven. He opens his mouth to say no, but then she looks up at him, her hazel eyes flecked with gold, and she smiles, a little shy, like she knows exactly what he’s thinking.
A group of kids chasing a golden retriever comes barrelling past, and one of them slams into Clara’s back hard enough that she stumbles forward. He reaches out without thinking, his hand wrapping around her bare elbow, his palm warm against her cool skin, holding her steady until she gets her footing. She doesn’t pull away, just keeps looking up at him, and she says she knows who he is, recognized him the second she walked up, didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to make him awkward, always thought her cousin was an idiot for leaving him, for not sticking around through the hard parts.
Roland freezes, his hand still on her elbow, and he admits he recognized her too, that he’d thought about that girl in the yellow sundress reading at his wedding more times over the years than he’d ever admit to anyone, that it was stupid, he knows. She laughs, quiet, the sound mixing with the twang of the country song playing on the portable speaker by the grill, and she leans in a little closer, her shoulder brushing his, says she thought about him too, thought he was the only person at that whole wedding who didn’t look like he was faking having a good time.
The tightness in his chest unravels completely then, the guilt he’d been holding onto for eight years, the fear that he was too broken, too scarred, too much of a hassle for anyone to want to put up with, fading fast enough that it makes his head spin a little. He tells her he’ll do the talks, whatever she needs, and then he asks her if she wants to ditch the cookout, get a chocolate milkshake at the diner on Main Street, the one with the neon sign that’s been broken on the left side since 2018. She says yes, grinning, wiping a smudge of ketchup off the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.
He tucks a stray strand of her auburn hair that fell loose from her braid behind her ear, the rough edge of his scar brushing her cheek, and she doesn’t flinch, just leans into the touch a little. When she laces her fingers through his calloused, scarred hand to walk to his beat-up 2007 Ford F-150 parked by the park entrance, he doesn’t pull away for the first time in almost a decade.
