Page 15 of Dream Weaver
“What was your biggest fire?” Claire asked next.
I thought it over. A tricky question, because there’d been a lot — and as many different ways of measuring them. The same went for the emotions that came with some of them.
Head back,my brother Peter yelled in my imagination. Loud enough to be heard over the roar of the encroaching fire.I got this. You help the others.
That had been my first season fighting fires. Peter’s last.
I stared into the past. It hadn’t even entered my mind to beg Peter to retreat with me, the way I’d come to beg in my dreams.
Claire’s crayon stopped scratching. And, oops. So did Abby’s hammering.
I blurted out whatever came to mind first. “Diablo Canyon fire.”
“Oh! My friend Tana has a horse named Diablo!”
A welcome diversion. I grabbed it, asking about the horse and Claire’s friend.
Things went on in that vein for a while, though the side-eyed glances Abby shot me had a softer gleam to them.
Thanks to Claire, my last hours at the shop passed more quickly than the first. When five o’clock rolled around, the other guys cleared out quickly, but Abby went on working.
“All right, now. Time to call it a day,” Walt announced from the door a half hour later.
“Coming,” Abby replied to his third reminder.
She didn’t protest my efforts to help clean up, though she did a double take when I returned tools to their locations — like I was a complete fool who hadn’t paid attention to anything all day. So, yay for me. I could go home proud of one tiny victory.
“Oh, this is for you.” Claire held out a picture.
“Wow. Thank you.”
Claire beamed. Me too. She’d drawn me so big, my legs ran off the edge of the paper. She’d even sketched a crooked hammer into my hands — or was that a Pulaski? The pink squigglesupervising my “work” had to be Hopper, and the whirl of a stick figure by the blocky forge had to be Abby.
“Do you like it?” Claire prompted.
I held it to my chest. “I love it. Thank you.”
“See you tomorrow?” Claire asked as we walked to our cars.
I pursed my lips, not sure how to reply. Lies were always bad, but lying to a kid was even worse.
I settled for, “Have a good night, kiddo.”
Chapter Five
ABBY
“So, how was your day?” my sister Erin asked over dinner.
“Apart from that disturbance this morning?” I grumbled.
Erin tilted her head toward Claire, warning me not to go there. Too late, though.
“What disturbance, Mommy?”
I refilled her water glass. “The new horses were a little unsettled, that’s all.”
That wasn’t exactly what Erin and I had concluded when we’d compared notes before dinner. In fact, we’d both agreed that something had disturbed the magic laced into the red, rocky landscape. What exactly that was, we had no clue. Only that it didn’t bode well, and we had to remain alert for trouble.
