Rafe Ortega, 53, retired wildland fire dispatch supervisor, stood in the hour-long brisket line at the Coconino County fall rib cookoff, plastic cup of IPA sweating through the flannel sleeve of his work shirt. He’d almost bailed 20 minutes prior, his usual instinct to avoid crowded small-town events winning out until he’d caught a whiff of hickory smoke curling over the fairgrounds, thick enough to cut with a pocketknife. His boots were still dusted with red Arizona dirt from tinkering on a 1978 Honda XR he’d dragged out of a scrap yard the weekend before, a scar slicing through the gray stubble on his left jaw from a dirt bike crash a decade prior. He’d avoided any kind of casual connection for 8 years, ever since his wife left him for a travel nurse she’d met while he was deployed to a fire in New Mexico, convinced romantic entanglements were just a recipe for getting burned worse than any stand of ponderosa pine he’d ever watched go up.
He was scrolling through old fire crew photos on his phone when someone’s elbow brushed his forearm, soft cotton cardigan catching on the sun-cracked hair along his skin. He looked up, and there was Clara Hale, sheriff’s wife, the woman he’d waved at from his mailbox every other week for three years, always in a crisp dress or blazer, always with her husband’s arm slung over her shoulders like a trophy. Today she was in high-waisted jeans and a faded Johnny Cash tee, her dark hair pulled back in a loose braid, holding a mason jar full of dill pickles in one hand and a cup of spiked hard cider in the other. “Sorry about that,” she said, grinning, and he realized he’d never seen her grin before, not the stiff, campaign-trail smile she wore to town halls, a real one, crinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes. “Line lurches faster than my old Yamaha TT-R when you hit the throttle wrong.”
Rafe blinked, surprised. He’d always pegged her as the country club type, the kind of woman who’d never touched a dirt bike in her life. “You ride?” he said, and she laughed, leaning in a little closer than polite, close enough he could smell lavender lotion mixed with the smoke from the cookoff pits, the twang of the bluegrass fiddle playing on the main stage fading to background noise. “Grew up riding trails outside Prescott, before I married a man who thinks an off-road vehicle is a Ford F-150 with leather seats,” she said, holding out the mason jar of pickles. “Want one? Brine’s three years old, I make it myself.”
Their fingers brushed when he took the pickle from her, and she held his gaze for three full beats, longer than any married woman in a town this small had any business holding a single man’s gaze. He took a bite, tang of dill and garlic bursting across his tongue, and nodded. “Good,” he said, and she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, her shoulder brushing his again when the crowd surged forward another 10 feet. He was already warring with himself, old anger flaring at the idea of being the other guy, the kind of man who broke up marriages, the same kind of man his ex-wife had left him for. But there was something in her eyes, tired, sharp, like she saw the version of him he hid from everyone else, the guy who still cried when he listened to old Gordon Lightfoot records, who left bowls of food out for the feral cats that hung around his garage.
She nodded toward the dirt trail that curved away from the fairgrounds, toward the oak and aspen stands lining Oak Creek. “I’m supposed to meet my sister-in-law at the beer tent in 20 minutes,” she said, voice low enough no one else could hear. “Wanna walk? Get away from all this noise for a minute.” Rafe hesitated, every rule he’d written for himself after his divorce screaming at him to say no, to grab his brisket when he got to the front of the line, drive home, work on the Honda until his knuckles were scraped and his brain was empty. But he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Sounds good.”
The noise of the cookoff faded as they walked, leaves crunching under their boots, the air sharp with the first bite of fall. She stopped when they rounded a bend out of sight of the fairgrounds, leaning against a white aspen trunk, and turned to him. “He’s cheating on me,” she said, no preamble, referring to her husband. “Has been for two years, with his secretary. Everyone in his circle knows, no one bothered to tell me. I saw his texts this morning, right before we were supposed to come here. He bailed, said he had to respond to a highway crash. He’s at her house.” She reached out, her thumb brushing the scar on his jaw, soft and warm, and he didn’t pull away. “I always wondered how you got this,” she said, quiet.
He didn’t answer. He leaned in, kissed her, soft at first, like he was testing the water, then deeper when she kissed him back, her hands tangling in the graying hair at the nape of his neck. She tasted like dill pickles and hard cider, the cold of the fall air biting at his cheeks, the distant sound of the bluegrass fiddle drifting through the trees. They pulled apart when they heard a kid’s laugh echoing down the trail, her cheeks flushed, her braid half falling loose. She adjusted her cardigan, smiling a little shaky. “I have to go meet my sister-in-law,” she said. “My husband’s leaving for a conference in Phoenix tomorrow night. I’ll leave the kitchen window above the sink unlocked. The back gate doesn’t latch right, you don’t have to knock.”
He nodded, watching her walk back toward the fairgrounds, her boots kicking up a little red dust as she went, the sound of the crowd getting louder the closer she got. He tucked the mason jar lid she’d handed him to hold while she adjusted her shoe earlier into the pocket of his flannel, turned toward the parking lot where his beat up Ford truck was parked, already running through the back roads that led to her house, the ones the sheriff’s patrol cars rarely drove after dark.
