Rafe Mendez, 52, retired smokejumper who now runs a backcountry gear repair shop on the edge of Bozeman, Montana, has a rule about not mixing business with small-town social events. He’s avoided the annual Gallatin County Fair for seven straight years, ever since his divorce went final and half the county was still picking sides between him and his ex-wife. But he owes the 4H livestock coordinator a favor, so he drags himself out on the muggy last Saturday of August to drop off the custom tooled leather saddle he repaired for the youth auction, figuring he’ll slip out before anyone he recognizes can corner him.
The air reeks of fried Oreos, diesel from the tractor pull, and dust caked to the sweat on his sunburned forearms. He grabs a root beer from a concessions stand, leans against the split rail fence lining the auction barn, and is halfway through calculating how fast he can drive back to his shop before the evening rain hits when someone’s elbow slams into his bicep hard enough to make him slosh root beer down his front.
He turns, ready to snap, and stops short. Lila Marquez, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, is grinning at him, wiping a smudge of corn dog mustard off her cheek with the back of her hand. She’s 48, runs a hot yoga studio in Missoula, and he’s had a quiet, stubborn, entirely off-limits crush on her since 2002, when he showed up to her family’s Christmas party with a broken collarbone from a jump and spent three hours fixing her grandma’s wobbly rocking chair while everyone else got drunk on eggnog.
“Sorry about that,” she says, nodding at the root beer stain on his faded Carhartt tee. She’s wearing cutoff denim shorts, scuffed cowboy boots caked in mud from the corn maze, and a frayed Willie Nelson tour tee thin enough he can see the outline of the sun tattoo on her left shoulder. She smells like jasmine body spray and campfire smoke, and when she reaches for the napkin sticking out of his front pocket, her knuckles brush his stomach, sending a jolt up his spine he hasn’t felt in close to a decade.
He freezes, his brain short-circuiting between the old rule — she’s family, off limits, even now — and the way she’s holding eye contact three beats longer than casual, like she knows exactly what he’s thinking. They make small talk first, her asking about the repair shop, him asking about her studio, and he’s shocked at how easy it is, how she laughs at his dumb joke about the hiker who brought in a backpack chewed half to pieces by a grizzly, how she actually listens when he talks about doing pro bono repair work for the new class of smokejumpers stationed west of the park.
She teases him for being the same stubborn guy she remembered, the one who’d drive three hours in a blizzard to help a stranger change a tire, who never asked for anything for himself even when his marriage was falling apart. The comment stings a little, but not in a bad way — no one ever bothered to see that back then, everyone just assumed he was the one who checked out first.
They wander over to the beer garden after the saddle sells for double the expected bid, find a rickety picnic table tucked behind a stand of cottonwood trees, far enough away from the crowds that no one they know will spot them. They split a plate of fried cheese curds, and when she leans in to grab the last one, her knee presses against his under the table, and she doesn’t pull away.
She admits she drove up to the fair specifically because she saw his name on the saddle auction listing, that she’d been working up the nerve to talk to him for six months after she heard he was single and not seeing anyone. He admits he thought about her more times than he could count when he was married, that he’d make up excuses to stop by her family’s house just to say hi, that he never acted on it because he didn’t want to be the guy who broke up a family.
The first firework goes off over the fairgrounds just then, painting the sky neon pink, and she reaches across the table, runs her thumb over the thick scar on his right knuckle from a chainsaw accident three years prior. “No rules anymore, Rafe,” she says, quiet enough only he can hear it over the roar of the crowd.
He doesn’t overthink it, doesn’t run through the list of potential downsides, doesn’t worry about what his ex-wife or her family will say. He leans in, kisses her, and she tastes like cherry limeade and sour candy, and when she threads her fingers through his hair, he forgets entirely that he was planning on leaving early.
They sit there through the rest of the fireworks show, holding hands under the table, and when the last spark fades, he asks if she wants to come back to his place. He’s got a vintage 1970s smokejumper tent set up behind his shop, he says, and he makes a mean pot of campfire chili, enough for two. She says yes, grinning so wide the dimples in her cheeks show.
He slings his arm over her shoulder as they walk toward the parking lot, ignores the distant holler of one of his old smokejumper buddies waving from the tractor pull stands, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t feel the urge to make up an excuse to leave something that feels this right.
