Rafe Marquez, 53, spent 22 years on a federal hotshot wildland firefighting crew before a 2019 blaze shattered his left ankle and pushed him into early retirement. Now he runs a one-man brush clearing and firewood delivery service out of a beat-up 2006 Ford F-150 outside Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and he’s spent the last seven years actively avoiding any situation that might lead to a second date, still stinging from losing his wife to ovarian cancer six months after he retired. His biggest flaw, as his old crew chief never tires of telling him, is he’d rather argue with a pine tree for three hours than admit he’s lonely.
He’s manning the charcoal grill at the local fire department’s annual end-of-summer fundraiser when she walks up, faded red flannel tied around her waist, bare calves dusted with dandelion pollen, holding a crumpled $10 bill in one hand and a half-eaten bag of kettle corn in the other. The air smells like hickory smoke and melted cheese, and the distant shriek of kids bouncing on a rented inflatable obstacle course hums under the chatter of regulars. He hands her a cheeseburger wrapped in foil and a sweating cup of lemonade, and their fingers brush when she takes them. The contact is quick, but he feels it all the way up his arm, calloused rough skin against hers, soft but dotted with small paint stains at the knuckles. He brushes the feeling off, tells himself he’s being a dumb old man who hasn’t talked to a woman who isn’t a cashier or his sister in six months.
She comes back twenty minutes later, holding a warm chocolate chip cookie wrapped in a paper napkin, and says she heard he cuts half-price deals for elderly folks and single parents clearing brush off their property. She’s the new elementary school art teacher, moved to town three months prior, renting the old Hansen place on the edge of town, and she’s got a stand of overgrown jack pines behind the house she needs taken down to build a small pottery shed. Rafe’s first instinct is to make a snarky joke about city transplants wanting to turn the north woods into a craft retreat, but she laughs before he can get it out, says she grew up on a dairy farm outside Eau Claire, can split a cord of oak in two hours flat, just doesn’t have the heavy equipment to take down 60-foot pines without risking taking her roof off.
He agrees to come by Saturday at 10, and they end up leaning against the rail of the grill for the next two hours, chatting between his turns flipping patties and brats. She stands close enough he can smell lavender shampoo mixed with the smoke clinging to her flannel, and she holds eye contact longer than most people do, doesn’t flinch when a hot spark pops less than a foot from her arm, just swats it away like it’s a gnat. She doesn’t wince or make a big fuss when she notices the thick, twisted scar curling up his left forearm from a 2018 blaze in Oregon, just nods and says that looks like it hurt worse than the time she got kicked in the ribs by a spooked heifer when she was 16. He keeps catching himself staring at the smudge of charcoal on her left cheek, his fingers itching to brush it away, and he has to remind himself every three minutes that he doesn’t do this anymore, that letting someone in just means losing them later.
The fundraiser wraps up as the sun dips below the pine line, dusk painting the sky pink and orange, crickets chirping loud enough to drown out the last of the departing guests’ chatter. Rafe is hauling a heavy cooler of leftover root beer to the fire department’s pickup when he trips over a half-buried cinder block by the picnic tables, and she lurches forward to catch him, her hand wrapping tight around his bicep. They both stumble a little, ending up pressed against the cool metal side of the truck, her hip against his, her hand still curled around his arm. The porch light of the fire station flickers on behind her, catching the gold flecks in her brown eyes, and she’s close enough he can feel her breath on his jaw when she speaks, soft and dry, no pity, no pushiness. “You don’t have to be so scared of talking to someone who actually likes listening to you, you know.”
Rafe freezes for half a second, his internal alarm bells screaming that he should make a joke, step back, change the subject, but he doesn’t. He lifts his right hand, brushes the charcoal smudge off her cheek with his thumb, the rough callus on the tip catching a little on her soft skin, and she shivers just barely, her gaze never leaving his. “I’m not scared,” he says, and for the first time in seven years, he means it. “Just out of practice.”
He walks her to her beat-up Subaru, and they confirm the Saturday time again, he tells her to have a full batch of those chocolate chip cookies waiting when he shows up, and she laughs, says she’ll even add extra chocolate chips if he brings her a free bundle of firewood for her fireplace. He leans against his truck as she drives off, the taillights fading down the dirt road, and he takes a slow sip of warm beer he pulled from the leftover cooler earlier. He looks down at his thumb, and it still smells like lavender and charcoal.
