Rafe Navarro, 52, has smelled like pine smoke and diesel for as long as he can remember. He spent 22 years on an interagency hotshot crew, chasing wildfires across the West before he took a bad fall on a blaze outside Missoula, tore his ACL, and moved back to the northern Michigan town his grandma grew up in to run a small firewood delivery outfit. His only company most nights is his floppy hound dog Mabel and a stack of dog-eared western paperbacks, and he’s gone eight years without so much as a second date, convinced the scar slicing across his left eyebrow and the permanent grit under his fingernails make him too rough around the edges for anyone to want to stick around. He’d stopped by The Timberline bar on his way home from dropping a cord of oak off for a widow down the road only because the harvest festival crowds had clogged the main highway, and the only empty stool in the whole place was tucked next to his new neighbor, the one whose husband shipped out to Kuwait with the National Guard three months prior.
He nods a polite greeting when he sits, keeps his elbows tight to his sides so he doesn’t brush her, orders a spiced cider on tap because he’s driving. The bar smells like fried cheese curds and old beer and the cinnamon sticks steeping in the big glass cider urn behind the counter, peanut shells crunching under every pair of scuffed work boots that cross the floor. The jukebox is blaring Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” so loud he has to lean in half an inch to hear her when she says hello, soft, like she’s been working up the courage to say it for a while. Her name is Clara, he knows, she brought him a plate of still-warm chocolate chip cookies when she moved in back in June, and he’d mumbled a thank you and practically ran back inside, scared his face was turning bright red like a smitten teenager’s.
Their knees brush under the bar when she shifts to reach for her own glass of wine, and he yanks his leg back like he’s been burned, mutters a clumsy apology. She laughs, a low, warm sound that cuts through the bar noise, and says it’s fine, she’s the one who’s been crowding him since he sat down. He can smell her lavender shampoo over the mix of bar scents, can see the faint smatter of freckles across her nose that she tries to cover with powder, can tell she’s just as lonely as he is by the way she keeps glancing up at him through her lashes, like she’s waiting for him to say something he shouldn’t. A twist of guilt knots in his gut, sharp and heavy—she’s married, for Christ’s sake, her husband’s over in a desert dodging rocket fire, and here he is sitting two inches from her, thinking about how soft her hand would feel in his. He should leave, he thinks, should slap down a five dollar bill for his cider and climb in his beat-up silver pickup and go home to Mabel and his paperbacks and pretend this never happened. But then she passes him a napkin to wipe a drop of cider off his chin, and her fingers brush his jaw for half a second, and every coherent thought in his head goes quiet.
She leans in then, so close her shoulder is pressed firm against his bicep, her breath warm against his ear when she tells him she’s been watching him split wood in his side yard every morning for months, that her husband used to complain for hours about how bad he was at stacking firewood, that she likes watching Rafe work, strong and steady, no mess, no fuss. He doesn’t pull away. He turns his head just enough that their foreheads almost touch, and he can see the gold flecks in her hazel eyes, can taste the cinnamon on her breath when she exhales. He tells her he’s noticed her too, noticed her sitting on her porch drinking coffee at 6 a.m. wrapped in a fuzzy gray cardigan, noticed her waving when he pulls into his driveway after long deliveries, noticed how quiet her house is when the sun goes down, no blaring TV, no loud music, just the same kind of hollow quiet his has. She nods, and her hand lands on his knee, light at first, then firmer when he doesn’t move it.
They leave the bar 20 minutes later, the first light snow of the season drifting down from the dark gray sky, sticking to the brim of his frayed canvas work hat. He holds her elbow to steady her when she slips on a patch of black ice left over from the previous night’s frost, and she wraps her fingers around his wrist to keep her balance, her palm warm even through his thick flannel shirt. They stop at the edge of their shared gravel driveway, the streetlight casting soft gold over the snow between them, and she says she doesn’t want anything complicated, doesn’t want to hurt anyone, just wants someone to sit with sometimes, to watch bad 90s action movies with, to share a plate of cookies with when the winter nights get too long and too quiet. He nods, because that’s all he wants too, no drama, no empty promises, just a little less loneliness to get through the cold months. She squeezes his hand once before she turns to walk to her front door, and he stands there until she’s inside, until he sees her kitchen light flip on through the gingham curtains. When he closes his own front door 30 seconds later, he can still feel the heat of her hand on his palm, and for the first time in 8 years, he doesn’t reach for the half-empty bottle of bourbon he keeps on the kitchen counter.
