Ronan Voss, 62, had spent 18 years perched in 100-foot steel towers scanning the Oregon Cascades for wispy plumes of wildfire smoke, and 8 years after his wife’s death doing his best to avoid all human contact that didn’t involve a hardware store checkout line. He’d only shown up to the county fire department’s summer beer garden fundraiser because his 16-year-old niece had begged, saying she needed a chaperone so she could hang out with her friends without her mom breathing down her neck. He’d planned to slip out after an hour, beer in hand, to hike the ridge behind the fairgrounds before sunset.
He was parked on a dented folding chair at the far edge of the crowd, picking at a plate of smoked brisket, when she tripped over the extended leg of his chair. She was mid-laugh at something someone had yelled from the food truck line, a paper plate piled high with pulled pork in one hand, and she caught herself by slamming her free palm flat against his forearm, calloused fingers curling just enough into the frayed sleeve of his wool flannel to keep from face-planting into the dirt. The first thing he noticed was the smell: pine soap, faint campfire smoke, and a hint of strawberry lip balm that cut through the pervasive tang of charcoal and beer.
“Jesus, sorry about that,” she said, leaning back just far enough to meet his eyes, no embarrassed flush, no overly polite fumbling, just a wide, crinkly-eyed grin that didn’t carry the sad, pitying edge he’d grown to hate from everyone in town who knew his story. She was 54, he later learned, the new county animal control officer, moved to the area three months prior from eastern Montana, work boots caked in mud, auburn hair streaked with gray pulled back in a messy braid that had escaped its tie at the nape of her neck. She nodded at the empty folding chair next to him. “You saving that for someone, or can I crash? All the other tables are full of guys who want to tell me how to do my job.”
He said sure before he could think better of it. He’d spent years telling himself any casual connection with someone new was a betrayal of his wife, that the pain of losing someone again wasn’t worth the few minutes of good conversation, but he couldn’t bring himself to send her away. She sat down, knee brushing his when she shifted to set her plate on the table between them, and he felt the heat of her through the thin denim of his jeans, sharp and unexpected.
She didn’t ask about the empty house he lived in up on the ridge, didn’t mention the obituary the local paper had run for his wife all those years ago, didn’t give him that quiet, tight smile people gave him when they thought he was lonely. She complained instead about a golden retriever named Max that kept escaping his yard to chase fire trucks, about the skunk she’d pulled from a restaurant trash can the week prior that had sprayed her entire work truck, about how the local coyote pack had been picking off barn cats and no one wanted to do the work to relocate them instead of shooting them.
He found himself talking more than he had in months, telling her about the time he’d spotted a 10-acre wildfire that started when a golden retriever knocked over a camp lantern, about how he’d learned to tell the difference between smoke from a controlled burn and a dangerous wildfire from 20 miles out, about the way the sun hit the Cascades at golden hour so the whole range looked like it was on fire. When she passed him an extra dill pickle from her plate, her thumb brushed his knuckle, and he didn’t pull away.
He was torn the whole time, part of him screaming that he was being stupid, that he was just setting himself up for more grief, that he didn’t deserve to enjoy talking to someone who made him laugh so hard his sides hurt, and the other part of him hungry for the contact, for the way she leaned in when he spoke, like every word he said mattered, for the way she held eye contact for a beat longer than polite, like she was seeing him, not just the widowed fire spotter everyone knew.
The fire department announced the 50/50 raffle winners right as the sun started to dip below the ridge, painting the whole fairground pink and orange. They’d both bought tickets earlier, him out of obligation, her out of boredom, and when they pulled their stubs out of their pockets, they realized their numbers were consecutive, off by one digit from the winning ticket. The consolation prize was a $40 gift card to the pie shop downtown, and she held it up, grinning. “I hate apple pie, and every pie in that place is half apple. You wanna split it? I’ll buy you a slice of whatever you want, you just have to listen to me complain about the idiot who dumped three kittens at the park this morning.”
He hesitated for two full seconds, the voice in his head that said stay alone, stay safe warring with the part of him that didn’t want the night to end, that wanted to hear more of her stories, that wanted to know what her favorite kind of pie was if it wasn’t apple. Then he nodded, folding his ticket stub and tucking it into his flannel pocket.
She led him to her beat-up white Ford pickup parked at the edge of the lot, dog bed in the back crusted with dog hair, half-eaten bag of beef jerky on the dashboard, country radio playing low through the cracked speakers. She pulled the driver’s side door open, then paused, leaning against the frame, and for a second he thought she was going to change her mind. Then she tossed the gift card into the cup holder, and nodded at the passenger seat.
He climbed in, the seat still warm from where she’d been sitting earlier, and she shut the door behind him.
