Hank Collier is 58, retired 3 years from the U.S. Forest Service after 27 years on wildland fire crews, his left knee still throbs when the humidity climbs, a souvenir from a 2019 blaze outside Helena where he dragged a 22 year old rookie to safety before a dead pine fell on the spot they’d been standing. He restores vintage fly reels out of his garage now, charges 40 bucks an hour, only takes jobs he feels like, spends every morning at The Notch, a dive bar on Bozeman’s Main Street, drinking black coffee and ignoring the same crew of retirees who rehash the same football and fire stories every damn week. His biggest flaw, if you asked the ex-wife who left him 7 years prior for a cruise ship director, is that he’d rather push people away than risk being disappointed again. He’s spent the last half decade proving her right, turning down blind dates, skipping the town’s stupid summer events, even avoiding his new next door neighbor for three months after she moved in, because the guys at The Notch had already labeled her a problem.
Clara Bennett is 54, runs a small vintage lingerie and loungewear shop downtown, the one the local evangelical church group spent two months protesting earlier this summer, claiming her silk slip window displays were “a danger to family values”. The city council held a hearing last week, voted 5-2 to let her stay, and the guys at The Notch had been grumbling about it ever since, calling her every name they could think of that didn’t get them thrown out by the bartender. Hank had never said a word either way, but he’d walked past her shop twice, caught a glimpse of her behind the counter, bent over a sewing machine, a streak of auburn hair falling in her face, and he’d felt a twist in his chest he hadn’t felt since he was a kid sneaking into drive-in movies with his high school girlfriend.