Manny Ortega, 58, spent 22 years as a wildland fire crew boss before trading his flame-retardant coat for a chainsaw and a 12-acre Christmas tree farm outside Bend, Oregon. His worst flaw, the one his niece chews him out for every holiday, is that he’d rather spend three days digging post holes in frozen mud than make small talk with neighbors who still side-eye him for his ex-wife leaving him for a travel nurse seven years prior. He only agreed to show up to the town’s fall craft beer festival because his niece’s small-batch hot sauce booth was short staffed, and he owed her for covering his farm chores when he got knee replacement surgery six months prior.
He was leaning against a splintered cedar fence post by the IPA tent, work boots caked with pine sap, a faded Carhartt jacket slung over his shoulder even though the October sun was warm enough to make sweat bead at the back of his neck, when she backed into him. The glass of hard cider she was holding sloshed over the rim, splattering dark amber drops across the front of his gray work shirt, and she spun around, apologizing so fast her silver hoop earrings swung. It was Clara Bennett, ex-wife of his old crew lead Jake, the woman he’d spent 15 years avoiding looking at for too long out of some warped sense of loyalty to the man who’d pulled him out of a collapsing stand of fir trees during the 2018 Camp Fire, the same blaze that left the snaking, silvery scar curling up Manny’s left forearm.
She froze for half a second, then laughed, the sound low and a little raspy, the way he remembered it from crew cookouts back when they were all younger and none of them were divorced or had bad knees or spent half their nights worrying about wildfire season rolling around again. She was wearing a faded denim jacket, a flannel shirt tied around her waist, work boots scuffed from digging in the dirt at the native plant nursery she’d opened three years prior, right after her and Jake’s divorce finalized. She brushed a strand of gray-streaked auburn hair out of her face, and her knuckle brushed the scar on his forearm by accident, the contact so light he almost missed it, but his skin prickled anyway.
They stood there for ten minutes, talking around the thing they both didn’t mention: the fact that Manny had turned down three separate invites to Jake’s annual fishing trips since the divorce, because every time he thought about being in a boat with Jake and seeing Clara’s name pop up on his phone, he felt like he was stealing something he had no right to. The air smelled like roasted hazelnuts, hop fumes from the beer tent, and the faint sweet tang of cotton candy from the kids’ booth a hundred feet away. The bluegrass band playing off to the side switched to a slower, twangy tune, and they had to lean in closer to hear each other, their elbows brushing every time one of them shifted their weight, the rough fabric of her flannel scraping against his bare arm.
He told himself he should leave, that talking to her this long was a line he shouldn’t cross, that Jake would never speak to him again if he found out how many times Manny had thought about her over the years, how he’d driven past her nursery a dozen times in the last six months just to see if her truck was in the parking lot. But she was asking him about the tree farm, about the knee replacement, about the old crew, and no one had asked him about anything other than his ex-wife or his tree prices in so long he forgot what it felt like to be seen as something other than the guy whose wife left him, the guy who used to fight fires.
She leaned in a little more, her shoulder pressing firm against his bicep, and he caught the scent of lavender hand lotion mixed with the cinnamon hard cider she was drinking. She said she’d been meaning to call him, actually, she had a two-acre patch of overgrown fir on the back of her nursery property she needed cleared to plant milkweed for monarch butterflies, and she knew he had the equipment and knew how to take down trees without tearing up the surrounding native growth. She didn’t mention Jake, didn’t mention the years they’d all spent avoiding this exact conversation, just held his gaze, her hazel eyes bright in the sun, and waited for him to answer.
The part of him that was still a crew boss, that still put loyalty above everything else, screamed that this was wrong, that he was betraying the man who’d saved his life. The rest of him, the part that had eaten frozen dinners alone for seven years, that hadn’t felt anyone’s hand on his arm outside of a doctor’s office in just as long, ached to say yes. He nodded before he could overthink it, said he could come by Saturday morning, bring his chipper, finish the job in a day if the weather held.
She grinned, pulled a chipped black Sharpie out of her jacket pocket, grabbed his left wrist to hold it steady, and scrawled her cell phone number across the skin just above his scar, her fingers cool and calloused from decades of digging in dirt, the marker gliding smooth across his sun-warmed skin. She told him she’d make blueberry pancakes, the kind with extra syrup he’d always stacked three high on his plate at crew cookouts, she’d remembered. Then she waved, said she had to go meet a group of her nursery employees by the food truck, and walked off, her flannel swinging around her hips as she went.
He stood there for a minute, staring at the bright blue ink on his wrist, the IPA in his plastic cup gone warm and flat. He pulled his beat up old flip phone out of his jeans pocket, fumbled with the keypad to type the number in, saved it under just her first name, no last name, like he was a 16 year old hiding a crush from his parents. His niece yelled his name from across the field, waving him over to meet a group of her friends, and he shoved the phone back in his pocket, wiped the pine sap off his jeans with the back of his hand, and walked toward her, the ink on his wrist still a little damp against the fabric of his jacket.
