Manny Ruiz is 59, a retired wildland fire crew supervisor who spent 32 years chasing blazes across Idaho, Wyoming, and western Montana before hanging up his fire boots last spring. His biggest flaw, the one his late wife Lila used to nag him about nonstop, is that he still treats every small personal want like a luxury he hasn’t earned. He still sleeps on his side of the king bed they shared, still buys her favorite mint chocolate chip ice cream every grocery run even though he doesn’t like it, still turns down invitations from friends to go fishing or to the local dive bar because he’s convinced he should be “useful” instead of enjoying himself. He’s at the Missoula County 4H fair on a sticky 82 degree August afternoon to drop off a cedar bird feeder he carved in his workshop for the silent auction, a favor for the local volunteer fire department’s fundraiser.
He’s leaning against the split rail fence by the pie contest table, sipping a lukewarm lemonade with a soggy paper straw that’s leaving a sticky ring around the rim of the cup on his calloused palm, when she trips over a loose fence slat at his feet. He reacts on muscle memory, reaching out fast to catch her elbow before she faceplants into a tray of peach pies still dusted with powdered sugar. His fingers brush the soft, sun-warmed skin of her forearm, and he catches a whiff of lavender hand lotion mixed with cut alfalfa and diesel, the scent sticking in his nose long after he lets go. She’s Clara Bennett, 41, the new county extension agent who moved back to town six months prior after a messy divorce from a cattle rancher out near Bozeman. Small town gossip has painted her as off-limits: too fresh from a split, too young for anyone over 50, too tied to Lila’s side of the family for Manny to even look at twice.
She steadies herself, brushing grass off the knee of her faded denim overalls, and holds his gaze for three beats longer than polite, no hurry to look away. Her nose is pink with sunburn, a smudge of dirt on her left cheek from kneeling to judge a 4H goat show an hour earlier, and she’s holding a stack of neon award ribbons wrapped in frayed rubber bands. She laughs, a low, rough sound that matches the gravel in her voice, and says she’s been meaning to corner him for weeks to ask about fire mitigation for the 10 acre plot she just bought outside town, the one tucked up against the Lolo National Forest boundary.
He doesn’t say no, even when a little voice in the back of his head screams that people will talk, that he’s betraying Lila by even having a conversation with her that doesn’t involve family holidays or potlucks. They walk to an empty picnic table at the edge of the fairgrounds, out of earshot of the crowds yelling over the sheep show and the carnival rides blaring 2000s pop music in the distance. Their knees brush under the table when they sit down, and she doesn’t shift hers away. He can feel the heat of her leg through his worn work jeans, a quiet buzz that settles low in his chest.
She teases him about the time he accidentally burned a pot of chili so bad during a 2019 fire deployment that the entire crew had to eat MREs for three days, a story Lila used to tell at every family gathering. She leans in when he talks about the best way to thin Ponderosa pines to reduce fire risk, her shoulder pressing light against his bicep, and he doesn’t move away. He finds himself telling her about the bird feeder he carved, how he’s been making them since Lila got sick, how each one has a tiny carved lily on the side, Lila’s favorite flower. She doesn’t look at him like he’s being sad or sentimental, she just nods, like she gets it, no pity in her eyes.
The silent auction closes an hour later, and when he wanders over to check who won his feeder, he finds out it’s her. She’s holding it in her hands, running a finger over the carved lily on the side, and she looks up when he approaches, grinning so wide the corners of her eyes crinkle. She says she needs help hanging it from the old fir tree in her front yard, the one that’s too tall for her to reach even with her tallest ladder, and asks if he can come over tomorrow after he’s done running fire safety training for the new volunteer recruits.
He hesitates for half a second, the old guilt flaring sharp and fast, before he nods. He knows Lila would have yelled at him for being so stupidly stubborn, for wasting years of his life shutting himself off from anything that might make him happy, for treating a nice thing like a sin. He walks her to her beat up 2008 Ford F150 parked at the edge of the lot, and she hands him a crumpled slip of receipt paper with her address scrawled on it in blue ballpoint. Her fingers brush his palm when she passes it over, warm and calloused from her own work fixing fence and checking crop yields across the county, and he tucks the paper into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, right next to the folded photo of Lila he keeps there.
He stands in the fine, chalky dust of the parking lot watching her taillights fade down the two-lane road, the sound of the fair’s loudspeaker fading behind him, and he already knows the extra galvanized hanging wire and cordless drill he’ll need are sitting on his workbench at home, right next to the block of cedar he’s been saving for his next feeder.
