For 94 Days I Talked to Her Every Night on a Fire Lookout Radio. I Didn’t Know What She Looked Like. On the Last Day of the Season, She Said She Was Coming Up the Mountain

I told her the truth.

“I see Red Pine,” I said. “The woman who named a star after a bad cup of coffee. Who reads Stegner twice. Who made me laugh in a thunderstorm three weeks after the anniversary of my wife’s death, when I didn’t think I’d laugh again until I died.”

She didn’t say anything.

“And I see that you’re beautiful,” I said. “Which I would have said on the radio ninety-four nights ago if I’d known.”

She laughed, and cried, and wiped her face with the blue bandana.

“Still handsome,” she said. “You weren’t lying.”

We stayed on the catwalk all afternoon. The season was over. Nobody was watching for smoke anymore. We watched the mountains anyway, the sun moving across a million acres of forest, the long shadows filling the valleys.

When the sun went down, the whole Bitterroot range turned orange, then pink, then a blue so deep you could feel it on your skin.

“I have to hike out tomorrow,” she said. “My sister’s picking me up at the trailhead in Elk City.”

“I hike out on Thursday.”

“I know.”

“Where are you going after?”

“Portland,” she said. “A follow-up scan in November. Then I don’t know. My life is a little empty right now.”

“Mine too,” I said. “I’ve got a cabin in McCall. Nobody in it but me.”

She was quiet.

Then she reached over and took my hand. Her fingers were cold from the wind.

“Abel,” she said. “Bald Mountain Lookout. Are you asking Red Pine something?”

“I’m asking if she’d like to have coffee,” I said. “In November. After the scan. Whatever the scan says.”

She held my hand tighter.

“Whatever it says?”

“Whatever it says.”

She looked out at the mountains for a long time.

Then she put her head on my shoulder.

“Red Pine copies,” she said softly. “Over.”