2. Reid
REID
The stick breaks clean when I bend it, and that tells me everything I don’t want to know.
Green wood folds. Dry wood snaps. This snaps because it wants to, the whole ridge holding its breath since June, waiting for a reason.
I crouch at the tree line above the north bowl with a fistful of dead needles going to dust in my palm and do the calculation I’ve been running all summer. Fuel moisture in the single digits. Humidity that never climbs back overnight.
We roll out Thursday. Detail down south, two weeks on the board, longer than that if I’m right about the season.
The crew’s known about the roll-out for weeks—that part’s just the calendar.
What they don’t have is what those numbers add up to in my head.
Two weeks is the hopeful version, and the whole state’s a struck match waiting on a wind.
That part I keep to myself. A man who hands his people his worst-case in September only buys them nights of lying awake over a dry spell they can’t do a thing about tonight.
That’s the job. You keep the worst of it quiet.
I let the needles fall and stand and look down at the town lit gold for leaf season, and I think about brown butter. Sage and apple. Because it’s September, and she has feelings about it.
Hell.
I’ve spent eleven years training myself not to want anything I can’t keep on a schedule, and a seasonal sous chef undid a decade of it in the time it took to eat a trout.
There’s no slot for this. My whole life runs on rotation and radio traffic, on being wherever the fire is by the time it’s big enough to have a name.
No version of me gets to drive down a mountain because he can’t stop thinking about a woman who put her feelings about September into the brown butter and then looked sorry she’d admitted it.
I drive down the mountain anyway.
The soft open starts at six. I’m on the patio at 5:40—early to dinner, which I’ve never once been. A server crossing the patio to light the table candles clocks me with a look that says he knows exactly what I’m doing and is decent enough not to say it.
“Crew’s not here yet,” he says.
“I’m aware.”
“Bar’s not pouring.”
“I’ll wait.”
“You want the trout.”
His tone is neutral—just a man confirming an order. I don’t dignify it with a response. He grins and disappears through the swinging door.
Thirty seconds later, she comes out, wiping her hands on a towel. Her hair is coming loose at the temple, and her expression is fighting itself the whole way across the patio.
“Twice in two nights,” Reagan says. “People are going to talk.”
“Let them.”
“You’re early. Nobody’s early to a place that isn’t charging yet. That’s a red flag. Are you a red flag?”
“Depends who’s reading.”
“I’m reading. I read all the flags. It’s my whole thing.” She stops across the little iron table, close enough that I catch flour and something green off her—sage maybe, a smear of it on her wrist that she hasn’t noticed. “Let me guess. You came back for the September feelings.”
“I came back for the trout.”
“That’s what they all say.” She drops into the chair across from me, which she shouldn’t while working, and I watch her surprise herself by sitting. “You get four minutes. Marchetti times my bathroom breaks with that clipboard. Gone too long, and he assumes I’ve defected.”
“To where?”
“Anywhere that’d have me.”
It’s a joke, but there it is again, the flinch under the banter. She’s already sure she’ll lose, so she jokes to get out ahead of it.
I know that flinch. I have one of my own. Mine just doesn’t talk as much.
“So what do you do,” she asks, “when you’re not inspecting fish?”
“Wildland crew. I run it.”
“Run it how far up? Are you the guy, or a guy?”
“The guy.” I don’t say superintendent. Out loud in front of her, it would sound like more than it is, and it’s already too much—a crew and a radio that doesn’t care what I want. “We go where it burns.”
“That sounds—” She edits the sentence mid-air. “That sounds like a job you don’t come home from at a decent hour.”
“I don’t come home at a decent hour. Some years, not a decent month.”
“Wife wait up?”
She tosses it at the pumpkins, casual, and it’s the least casual question anybody’s put to me in a year. Instead of deflecting, I hear myself tell her the truth, because a woman with sage on her wrist has apparently opened something in me.
“No wife. There was somebody, a while back. She wanted a man who was home.” I give the fork on the table a quarter turn.
“I wasn’t him. I kept picking the job over her, same as I always had, until she stopped waiting.
When it ended, I felt lighter, and that’s the part nobody warns you about.
That sometimes a thing ending is a window opening.
” I look up. “I told myself that was my one shot at the regular life. That I’d had my turn, wasn’t built for it. Made my peace. Clean.”
“Clean,” Reagan repeats.
“Clean,” I say, and it lands wrong, because I’m looking at her while I say it. Clean is the last word for what’s happening in my gut.
Then Noah’s boots hit the patio steps with the rest of the crew behind him, loud and starving, and she’s up and gone before I get another word out, back through the swinging door with the towel over her shoulder.
I spend the next two hours eating food I barely taste while the men I’d walk into a burn for talk over each other, and Noah watches me not watch the kitchen.
“You’re quiet,” he says.
“I’m always quiet.”
“You’re quiet like there’s a reason.” He tips his chin at the pass, where she’s plating with her whole body, fast and sure, owning a room she’s already decided she’s going to lose. “She’s young, Reid.”
“I know.”
“You know how old you are?”
“Eat your dinner.”
He eats his dinner. He isn’t wrong. I don’t need him to be right out loud, though.
By ten, the patio’s empty. The crew rolls out to the trucks, string lights buzzing, Prospect Street goes dark, window by window, down the block. I have a ridge drier than it was yesterday and a Thursday with my name on it. I should be in the truck.
I stay.
She finds me still there when she comes out to kill the patio heaters, apron gone, and she stops when she sees me. For a second, neither of us runs the bit.
“You’re still here,” she says.
“I’m still here.”
“That’s not a trout thing.”
“No.”
She crosses the patio and stops closer than the table can hide her, tired and lit up under the strings. She’s already braced for the part where I turn out to be one more good thing that leaves.
My girl, I think, before I can stop myself. My girl.
“We roll out Thursday,” I tell her, because I don’t hand people weight late. “Detail down south. Two weeks, maybe more.”
Something crosses her face. She nails it down before it can finish.
“Thursday,” she says. “That’s my day too. Chef decides the permanent spot Thursday, and I already know which way that one goes.” A dry tilt of her head. “You roll out, I get my no, all in the same day. Efficient.”
“Reagan.”
“It’s fine. Good, even. Clean.” She throws my own word back with a smile that costs her. “You get your fire, I get my no, right on schedule.”
That, right there, is the trouble.
Because I decided eleven years ago I’d spent my one shot at the staying life and the job had won.
I made my peace with the win. Standing on a cold patio watching this woman take herself apart in real time so a leaving man can’t do it for her, I understand I lied about the peace.
I don’t want the win. For the first time in a decade, I want to stay.
I want the whole life I told everybody I wasn’t built for.
Thirty-odd hours before a truck takes me south.
I’ve never once wished a fire would wait.
I do now.