Rafe Mendez, 62, retired smokejumper turned wildfire mitigation consultant, leaned against the dented tailgate of his 2004 Ford F-150 and sipped a lukewarm Pabst. He’d only come to the county fire department’s grant celebration barbecue because he’d written 80% of the application that landed them $200k for new gear, and skipping would have made the local chief call him a hermit for three weeks straight. His left cheek bore a thin, silvery scar from a 2018 blaze outside Missoula, the same fire that had put him in the hospital for three weeks and pushed him into early retirement from the USFS. His biggest flaw, the one he’d never admit out loud, was that he’d shut every possible casual connection out of his life after his wife Lynn died of ovarian cancer seven years prior, convinced any hint of warmth with another person was a betrayal he couldn’t stomach.
He’d been half a minute from grabbing his keys and bailing when Elara Voss tripped over a cinder block propping up a cooler, her free hand shooting out to steady herself against his bicep. She was 58, the new county extension agent, moved to town three months prior after a messy divorce from a corporate lawyer in Seattle, and he’d only spoken to her once before, over a quick email about fire-resistant landscaping for the county fairgrounds. Her palm was calloused, warm, dusted with a fine layer of dirt from planting native milkweed earlier that day, and she smelled like pine all-purpose cleaner and faint peach lip balm. “Sorry about that,” she said, laughing, the sound rough around the edges like she smoked a single cigarette every night after dinner. She was holding a paper plate heaped with smoked ribs and potato salad, her boots caked in the same red dirt that coated every surface within 20 miles of town.
Rafe flinched before he could stop himself. He hadn’t been touched by anyone who wasn’t a doctor or a grocery store cashier in closer to a decade. He mumbled a no-harm-done, already reaching for his keys again, but she didn’t move. She said she’d seen his name on the grant report, asked if he had ten minutes to talk about which native shrubs held up best to low-severity burns for a residential outreach program she was running. He hesitated, then nodded. He told himself it was for the county, that it was work, nothing more.
They sat on the tailgate of his truck while they talked, the space between their knees shrinking by slow degrees until their denim-clad legs brushed every time one of them shifted. She asked about his smokejumping days, not the generic “was it scary?” questions everyone else asked, but specific ones: what it felt like to step out of a plane into smoke so thick you couldn’t see your own boots, how he’d learned to identify tree species by the way they burned. At one point, she reached over without thinking, brushed a fleck of barbeque sauce off the edge of his jaw, her thumb catching the rough gray stubble along his cheek. Rafe froze. Half of him screamed that this was wrong, that he was spitting on Lynn’s memory by even sitting this close to another woman, by letting the warmth of her touch settle under his skin like he was starved for it. The other half of him hummed, soft and bright, a feeling he’d forgotten existed, the quiet thrill of being seen as more than the grumpy ex-smokejumper who yelled at tourists for leaving campfires unattended.
The sun dipped below the ridgeline, painting the sky streaks of tangerine and deep purple, and most of the crowd had packed up and left by the time they ran out of things to say about fire mitigation. The only sound left was the crackle of the dying grill 50 feet away and the distant call of a meadowlark. Elara rested her hand on the tailgate between them, her pinky finger brushing the side of his calloused, scarred knuckle. He didn’t pull away. She admitted she’d been lonely since she moved, that everyone in town still treated her like an outsider, that she’d almost packed her car and driven back to Seattle two weeks prior. He told her he’d been lonely for seven years, that he’d been too much of a coward to say it out loud until that second. He asked her if she wanted to drive up to the north ridge with him the next morning, to check on a stand of ponderosa pines that had survived last summer’s blaze, to point out which plants were already starting to grow back in the burn scar. She said yes, so fast she almost cut him off mid-sentence.
He walked her to her beat-up 2012 Subaru Outback, the back seat stacked with seed packets and gardening tools. She leaned in for a hug, and he hugged her back, not too tight, just enough to feel the curve of her shoulder against his chest, the faint press of her chin against the top of his shoulder. She waved as she pulled out of the dirt lot, her taillights fading into the dark. Rafe stood there for another minute, finishing the last warm sip of his beer, the ghost of her thumb on his jaw still lingering. He climbed into his truck, turned the key in the ignition, and reached for the radio dial to turn off the old country station he’d left playing that morning.
