Rafe Mendez, 52, retired Forest Service wildfire crew lead, had been pressed up against the splintered beer garden fence for 27 minutes when he decided he was leaving. His flannel stuck to his back under the July sun, the pine sap caked on his work boots melting a little into the gravel, and the cold IPA in his hand was the only thing keeping him from telling his neighbor Jake exactly where he could stick his “you need to get out more” lecture. It had been eight years since his wife Clara died in that car crash on the mountain pass, and he’d made a point of skipping every small town function he could, convinced the pitying looks and forced small talk were worse than spending his nights alone restoring vintage fly rods and working his way through the library’s entire western fiction collection. The air smelled like burnt bratwurst, pine, and sweat, the local cover band was butchering a Johnny Cash song, and he’d already ducked three separate attempts by the fire chief to rope him into volunteering for the upcoming prescribed burn season.
He turned to slip out the side gate, shoulder first, and bumped straight into someone hard enough to slosh half his IPA down the front of a cream linen dress. He froze, already bracing for the sharp rebuke he knew was coming, and looked down to see Elara Voss, the new county librarian everyone in town had been complaining about for the last three months. He’d avoided her like the plague ever since the story broke that she’d “banned” half the town’s favorite hunting memoirs, convinced she was some stuck-in-the-mud coastal transplant who didn’t get how the people here lived. She blinked down at the dark beer stain spreading across her stomach, then threw her head back and laughed, loud enough that a few people glanced over, a snort slipping out at the end that she tried to cover with her hand. “Relax,” she said, swiping a stray strand of auburn hair off her face, “I spilled lemonade on this same spot two hours ago. It was a bad dress day to begin with.” He noticed the tiny Ponderosa pine tattoo peeking out from under the cuff of her faded blue cardigan first, then the smudge of ink on her thumb, like she’d been stamping library books right before she came.