Rafe Mendez, 52, didn’t want to be at the Flagstaff craft beer festival. The retired USGS wildlife biologist, who now ran a 3-acre native plant nursery out on Highway 89, only showed up to help his niece haul her fry bread food truck into the vendor lot before the crowds hit. He’d planned to duck out after an hour, head home to plant the new batch of cliffrose seedlings he’d picked up the day before, but his niece begged him to stay long enough to try her new green chile cheese fries, so he’d lingered, leaning against a splintered pine post at the edge of the grounds, sipping a hazy IPA that was far too bitter for his taste, sun beating down on the faded brim of his 2016 tortoise survey hat.
He spotted her halfway through his second beer. Clara Bennett, his son Ethan’s 10th grade biology teacher, was leaning against a picnic table 20 feet away, laughing so hard at a story her friend was telling she had to brace one hand on the rough wood to stay upright. She was wearing a faded blue linen button-down tied at the waist, scuffed white cowboy boots, and a pair of jeans with a faint smudge of garden dirt on the right knee, and Rafe felt his chest go tight for half a second before he shook his head, annoyed at himself. She was Ethan’s teacher, for Christ’s sake. He’d spoken to her a dozen times over the years, first at parent-teacher conferences, later at the high school’s annual science fair, always polite, always distant. She was off limits, plain and simple, and he’d spent 8 years training himself to walk away from anything that looked like unnecessary complication after his ex-wife left him for a Scottsdale real estate agent.
She looked up then, caught him staring, and waved. Before he could pretend he was looking at something else, she pushed off the table and walked over, her boots crunching on the gravel path, a half-empty can of tangerine seltzer in her hand. She smelled like jasmine lotion and pine when she stopped a foot away, close enough that he could see the faint smattering of freckles across her nose, the tiny silver hoop earring in her left cartilage. They made small talk first: she asked about the nursery, he told her Ethan had sent a photo the week before of the first spotted owl nest he’d found at his new Forest Service job in southern Oregon, and she lit up, saying she always knew Ethan would end up working in wildlife, that his final project on desert tortoise habitat was still one of the best she’d ever gotten.
A group of rowdy college kids cutting through the crowd slammed into her shoulder a minute later, and she grabbed his forearm to steady herself, her fingers warm through the thin canvas of his Carhartt overalls. Rafe’s brain short-circuited for half a second, half of him screaming that this was a line he shouldn’t cross, the other half hyper-focused on the rough callus on the side of her palm, the way her thumb brushed the edge of the scar on his wrist from a 2018 rattlesnake encounter before she let go, apologizing, her cheeks pink. He told her not to worry about it, and they kept talking, edging closer every few minutes, until their shoulders were almost touching, the noise of the festival fading into background hum.
She mentioned she’d been trying to find native milkweed for her backyard pollinator garden for weeks, every nursery within 50 miles was sold out, and Rafe blurted out that he had three full flats of it back at the nursery, she could come by after the festival to pick some up if she wanted. He held his breath, waiting for her to say no, to pick up on the subtext, to remind him that she was Ethan’s old teacher, that this was weird, but she grinned, nodding, saying that would be perfect, she’d been stressing about getting the plants in the ground before the summer heat hit. When she handed him her phone to type in his address, their fingers brushed when he took it from her, and neither of them pulled away for a full three seconds, the air between them thick enough to taste like citrus and beer and dust.
They left the festival 45 minutes later, driving separately, Clara following his beat-up 2007 Tacoma the 12 miles out to the nursery, the sun dipping low over the San Francisco Peaks, painting the red rock buttes pink and orange. He led her back to the shade house where he kept the milkweed flats, the air thick with the smell of sage and wildflower, crickets starting to chirp in the grass around them. He handed her two full flats of the small green plants, his hand brushing hers again when he passed them over, and she leaned in, like she was going to kiss his cheek, and he turned his head just enough that their lips met, soft and slow, no hurry, no pressure. She tasted like lime seltzer and salt, and for the first time in eight years, Rafe didn’t feel the urge to make an excuse to leave early.