Rafe Marquez, 57, retired hotshot crew foreman now running a one-man tree trimming and firewood delivery outfit outside Grand Rapids, Minnesota, sat in his usual vinyl booth at the VFW’s Thursday night fish fry, picking lumpy coleslaw off his plate. The scar snaking up his left forearm, a souvenir of a 2018 blaze outside Ely, caught the neon of the jukebox playing Johnny Cash’s *Folsom Prison Blues* low in the background. He’d shown up alone, same as he had every Thursday for eight years, ever since his ex-wife Lisa packed her bags and moved to the Twin Cities with a pharmaceutical rep she’d met at a work conference. His rule was simple: eat the cod, drink two Grain Belts, leave by 7:30, no small talk that lasted longer than two minutes.
The rule broke when a woman in a puffer coat and scuffed work boots slid into the booth across from him, grinning like she knew exactly who he was. He recognized her half a second later: Clara Bennett, Lisa’s younger cousin, the one he’d met once at a wedding 12 years prior, the one who’d snuck him a shot of tequila under the table when Lisa was yelling at him for missing the first dance to help a groomsman fix his flat tire. She’d moved to town two weeks prior, she said, to teach 4th grade at the elementary school on the west side, and just finalized her divorce from a corporate lawyer in Chicago six months before.
She leaned forward to grab a french fry off his plate, her shoulder brushing his bicep, and he caught the scent of lavender hand lotion mixed with pine sap, like she’d been wandering the Christmas tree lot on the edge of town earlier that day. Her knee brushed his under the table when she shifted to get more comfortable, and she didn’t pull away, just held his eye contact for three beats longer than polite, the corner of her mouth ticking up when he coughed and looked away, flustered. She asked about the scar on his arm, not the generic “that must have hurt” line he got from strangers, but specific questions: how hot was the fire, how long did it take the crew to put it out, did he still get nightmares from the bad runs.
He told himself he shouldn’t be talking to her. It felt wrong, like crossing an unspoken line, messing with family of the woman he’d been married to for 16 years. Disgust pricked at the back of his throat when he thought about how Lisa would scream if she found out they were even sitting in the same booth, but that feeling faded fast when Clara laughed at his dumb joke about the VFW’s fry cook burning the cod half the time, her laugh loud and unapologetic, no fake giggle like the women he’d turned down at the hardware store over the years. She mentioned the dead ash tree leaning over the roof of the tiny cottage she was renting three miles down the dirt road from his cabin, and that her old Subaru had died in the parking lot that afternoon, and he offered her a ride before he could think better of it.
The drive to her place was quiet, snow flurries hitting the windshield of his beat-up Ford F-150, the heater blowing lukewarm air between them. She didn’t push him to talk, just hummed along to the old Merle Haggard CD he had stuck in the player, her hand resting on the center console an inch away from his. When they pulled up to her cottage, the porch light was out, and the walkway was coated in a thin sheet of black ice he didn’t see until her boot slipped when she stepped out of the truck. He reached out to catch her, his hand wrapping firm around her waist, pulling her close to his chest to keep her from falling, and their faces were three inches apart, so close he could taste the root beer she’d been drinking at the VFW on her breath.
He hesitated for half a second, the voice in the back of his head screaming that this was a bad idea, that he was going to regret it, that he was too old for this kind of mess. Then she tilted her chin up, her hand resting light on the scar on his forearm, and he kissed her, soft at first, then firmer when she kissed back, her fingers tangling in the gray hair at the nape of his neck. The snow kept falling around them, cold on the back of his neck, and he forgot all about the rule about leaving by 7:30, forgot all about Lisa, forgot all about the list of tree trimming jobs he had lined up for the next week.
He woke up the next morning in her guest bed, the smell of coffee and blueberry pancakes drifting from the kitchen. He pulled on his jeans and walked out, and she was sitting at the kitchen table flipping through the old hotshot crew photo album he’d left in the floor of his truck, wearing his faded green flannel he’d left draped over the back of the passenger seat the week before. She looked up when he walked in, grinning, and slid a mug of black coffee across the table to him, just how he liked it. He leaned against the counter, watching her stand to reach for the maple syrup on the shelf above the stove, the sleeve of his flannel slipping down to her wrist.