Rafe Mendoza is 52, a retired smokejumper who now runs a one-man wildfire mitigation consulting firm out of a converted garage behind his tiny Bozeman, Montana, house. He’s got a thin, silvered scar slicing across his left jaw from a 2019 blaze outside Helena, a habit of twisting the vintage Case pocket knife he keeps in his jeans pocket when he’s annoyed, the worn bone handle smooth from 20 years of use, and a hard rule against dating anyone tied to local government, a rule forged after his ex-wife, a former county clerk, left him for a real estate developer eight years prior. He’d only agreed to come to the Gallatin County Fair that late August evening because his 16-year-old niece was showing her 4-H steer, and she’d threatened to hide all his favorite fly fishing gear if he bailed.
He’s leaning against the splintered wooden rail of the 4-H barn, plastic cup of cheap lager in one hand, dust caked in the treads of his work boots, when she squeezes past him in the narrow aisle. Her hip presses firm against his for half a second, rough work denim rubbing against his own jeans, and she smells like lavender hand cream and fresh cut alfalfa. He recognizes her immediately as Elara Voss, the new county extension agent he’s only ever spoken to on the phone, the woman who’d spent three hours arguing with him last month about setback requirements for a client’s property line. He’d pictured her as a stiff, desk-bound bureaucrat in a blazer, but she’s wearing a faded Montana State sweatshirt, work gloves with a hole torn at the thumb, and cowboy boots caked in more mud than his own. She mumbles an apology, but her dark eyes hold his for three full beats, too long for polite small talk, and the corner of her mouth tugs up in a half-smile like she knows exactly who he is, too.
He tells himself he’s being an idiot for even noticing the freckles across her nose, the chipped navy nail polish on her left index finger, the way she kneels in the mud without hesitation when his niece mentions the steer has a sore hoof. Half the guys in the county have asked her out in the six months she’s lived here, from the sheriff to the biggest cattle rancher in the valley, and she’s turned every single one down cold. The guys at the VFW call her “the Ice Queen” behind her back, say she’s got no time for small town nonsense, that anyone who tries to make a move is wasting their time. He’s got a stack of permit applications on his desk at home waiting to be filled out, a pile of firewood to split before the first frost, and zero interest in being the latest guy she laughs off.
But when she stands up, wiping mud off her jeans, and asks him if he wants to grab a drink at the fair beer garden after the steer judging wraps, he says yes before he can talk himself out of it. The guy running the beer stand winks at him when he orders her a seltzer and another lager for himself, mouths “good luck, sucker” loud enough that Rafe can hear him over the roar of the Tilt-A-Whirl a hundred feet away. They sit at a splintered picnic table at the far edge of the garden, far enough from the crowd that they don’t have to yell over the fair’s cover band butchering a Luke Combs song. The air smells like fried dough and smoked sausage, the distant creak of the Ferris wheel mixing with the low moo of cattle from the barn behind them.
She admits she’d been avoiding asking him out for weeks, because everyone in the county office says he’s a surly loner who hates county staff, that he’d rather fight with a permit clerk than say hello. He laughs, tells her he’d thought she was a stuck-up desk jockey who cared more about red tape than keeping people’s houses from burning down, until he saw her kneel in the mud to check a steer’s hoof like it was the most important thing she’d do all day. When she reaches across the table to brush a crumb of funnel cake off his chin, her fingers are warm, calloused at the tips from hours of using a soil probe out in the field, and he doesn’t flinch away. He’d spent eight years convincing himself he was better off alone, that dating in a small town was more trouble than it was worth, that the risk of getting burned again wasn’t worth the effort, but for the first time in longer than he can remember, he doesn’t feel the urge to make an excuse and leave.
She mentions the ridge off Jackrabbit Road, the one that looks out over the whole valley, says she’s been wanting to catch the sunset up there but hasn’t had anyone to go with who knows the back roads well enough not to get stuck. He grabs his worn Carhartt jacket off the back of the picnic table bench, tucks his pocket knife back into his jeans, and walks her to his beat-up Ford F-150 parked in the dirt lot by the fair entrance. She slides into the passenger seat, adjusts the vent so the cool air hits her face, and her knee brushes his when she leans over to grab the water bottle he keeps in the center console. He turns on the radio, the crackle of an old Johnny Cash song cutting through the static, and pulls onto the dirt road leading up the mountain, not once checking his rearview mirror to see if anyone they know is watching.