Clay Bennett, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service ranger, had a rule he’d stuck to for seven straight years, ever since his wife Sharon lost her fight with ovarian cancer: no messing with women more than ten years his junior. It wasn’t a morality play, exactly. He’d just seen too many guys his age make fools of themselves chasing 20-somethings at the local VFW bar, buying them overpriced seltzers and lying about their time in the service to look cool. He’d rather sit in his usual booth at Taco Tuesday, drink his $3 Pabst, eat three carnitas tacos loaded with extra cilantro, and be home by 9 to watch the Western channel. That Tuesday, the bar was louder than usual, the jukebox blaring Waylon Jennings, a crew of younger veterans playing darts in the back, their laughter bouncing off wood panel walls sticky with decades of beer spills.
He was wiping sour cream off his chin when she slid into the booth across from him, no invitation, just a quick grin that made him blink. Lila Marlow, 37, Mike Marlow’s kid. He’d carried her on his shoulders at her 10th birthday party, helped fish her out of Flathead Lake when she’d fallen off a dock at 12, stood next to her at her dad’s funeral when Mike died in the 2008 wildfire that burned 12,000 acres of the forest they’d patrolled together for 18 years. She was supposed to be living in Portland, working as an event planner, he thought. Her dark hair was pulled back in a messy braid, she was wearing a faded Forest Service hoodie that had been her dad’s, he recognized the frayed cuff on the left sleeve where Mike had caught it on a barbed wire fence back in 2001. “You still hate pickled onions on your tacos?” she asked, nodding at his plate, and he stared, because he hadn’t seen her in at least five years.