Rafe Mendez, 62, retired US Forest Service fire spotter, leaned against the splintered split-rail fence surrounding the Oregon small town square’s summer beer garden, sipping a hazy IPA he’d only bought to avoid making small talk with the retired fire chief lingering by the food truck. He’d only showed up at all because his 17-year-old niece was playing fiddle with her bluegrass trio for the fire department fundraiser, and his sister had threatened to drop off a month’s worth of frozen casseroles on his porch if he bailed. The sun hung low over the pine ridgeline, painting the tops of the Douglas firs tangerine, and the air smelled like grilled onions, citronella candles, and the faint, sharp tang of pine resin that still clung to the cuffs of his frayed dark green Carhartt jacket, even after three years off the job. His biggest flaw, one he’d leaned into hard since his wife Elaina died of ovarian cancer 8 years prior, was intentional isolation: he still slept only on his side of the bed, hadn’t touched her side of the closet since her funeral, and avoided all community events unless backed into a corner.
He was halfway through his second beer, nodding along to a fast-paced cover of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” when the space next to him on the fence post sank, and a warm, denim-clad thigh brushed his. He looked over, and there was Clara Hale, 58, owner of the town’s native plant nursery, ex-wife of his old fire crew partner Jake, who he’d worked with for 12 years before Jake moved to Montana after their divorce 6 years prior. Rafe’s throat went tight. He’d known Clara for 20 years, had been to their wedding, had helped them fix the leaky roof on their first house, had spent dozens of summer barbecues at their place, and for almost all of that time, he’d tucked away a stupid, unspoken, completely off-limits crush he’d never dared breathe a word of to anyone, not even Elaina.
“Thought that was you,” she said, grinning, and her voice was the same low, rough, honeyed sound he remembered, like she spent half her days yelling over wind in the trees and the other half laughing too hard at bad jokes. She smelled like lavender and pine sap and citrus, and when she tilted her head back to take a sip of her peach seltzer, he noticed the freckles across her nose had gotten darker, and there was a thick silver streak running through the left side of her dark brown hair, pulled back in a loose braid. “You still wear that beat up jacket? I swear you had that thing the year we did the prescribed burn up on Miller Ridge, 2012?”
He snorted, surprised he wasn’t fumbling his words. “Only when I don’t feel like talking to people. Doesn’t work as well as it used to, apparently.” She laughed, loud enough that a few people turned to look, and she leaned in a little closer, so her shoulder was pressed to his bicep, to yell over the end of the fiddle set. “Please, everyone in this town knows if you’re wearing that jacket, you’re either working or in a mood. I figured I’d risk it.”
The first prickle of conflict hit him then, sharp and warm at the same time. On one hand, he felt like he was breaking some unwritten rule— the one that said you don’t look at your old partner’s ex-wife like that, the one that said you don’t even think about dating anyone else after 32 years of marriage, not when you still set an extra mug out for coffee every morning out of habit. On the other, he couldn’t remember the last time someone had talked to him like he was a regular person, not some sad widower everyone tiptoed around. She remembered he hated pickles on his burger, when the kid from the food truck came around taking orders. She remembered he used to bring Elaina wild blackberries every August, picked from the bushes along the fire access road up to the lookout he’d manned for 18 years.
When the set ended, his niece waved at him from the stage, and Clara tugged on his sleeve to get his attention, nodding at the trailhead at the edge of town. “I’ve been meaning to ask you for months,” she said, picking at the label on her seltzer can, her gaze darting up to his and away, like she was nervous too. “I heard the wildflowers are blooming all over the meadow around the old lookout, and the sunset views from up there are insane right now. I’ve got a few native rhododendron saplings I’ve been wanting to plant up there, they don’t do well down in the valley heat. You wanna come with me next Saturday? I’ll bring the seltzer, you can bring whatever terrible snack you like.”
He hesitated for a full ten seconds, every part of him screaming that this was wrong, that he was betraying Elaina, betraying Jake, that he’d just end up hurting both of them. But then she looked up at him, and her dark brown eyes were soft, and she was biting the corner of her lower lip, and he realized he couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted to do anything other than go home to his empty cabin and watch old westerns. “Yeah,” he said, before he could talk himself out of it. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
A breeze picked up then, blowing loose strands of her braid against his cheek, and she tilted her head up, so close he could feel her breath on his jaw. “I always thought you were the quietest, most stubborn man I ever met,” she said, soft enough no one else could hear. “Also the kindest.” He didn’t say anything, just reached up and brushed the hair off her face, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her cheek, and she didn’t pull away, just leaned into the touch a little, her eyes fluttering shut for half a second.
She left half an hour later, after they swapped numbers, after he told her he’d pick her up at 4, so they’d have time to hike up before the sun set. She opened the door to her beat up forest green pickup, then turned around, leaned in, and gave him a quick, soft kiss on the corner of his mouth, her lips warm and a little sticky from the peach seltzer. “Don’t be late,” she said, grinning, before she climbed in and pulled away.
He stood there until her taillights disappeared around the corner at the end of Main Street, sipping the last of his warm beer, the spot where she’d kissed him tingling like he’d touched a live wire. He tucked the scrap of paper with her cell number scrawled on it into the inner pocket of his Carhartt, already mentally packing the cooler with her favorite peach seltzer and the blackberry shortbread he used to bake for Elaina, that he hadn’t made in almost a decade.
