Page 89 of Christmas with Three Firemen

I slide a plate in front of her. Eggs, good bacon, a pancake shaped like a snowman because Rico dared me, and I have never once backed down from a dare involving breakfast food.

“Coming back for the toy drive next year?” I ask.

She looks up.

It’s not the question I mean. We both know it isn’t. It’s small enough to answer over pancakes, low stakes, easy, wearing the coat of an ordinary logistics question about a charity event eleven months away.

But I watch it land on her the way the real question would land, watch something behind her eyes go very still and very careful, the way it does when she’s deciding how much truth a moment can hold.

“I don’t know where I’ll be next December,” she says.

“That’s not a no.”

“It’s not a yes either.”

“I’ll take it.” I sit down across from her with my own plate. “For the record, the crew’s already decided you’re running the drop-offs next year. Kowalski’s been telling people.”

“Kowalski doesn’t get a vote.”

“Kowalski’s been here since before the building had indoor plumbing. Kowalski gets several votes.”

That gets something out of her, not quite a laugh, but close, the corner of her mouth giving up half a fight. She eats her eggs. I eat mine. That’s my attempt at the question, small as I could make it, and now the day gets away from me before I can see whether it landed.

Crossing the bay a while later with a box of returned toy drive extras, I catch someone else’s version of the same question.

Wes is at the side entrance with Noelle. I’m not close enough to hear what he’s saying, if he’s saying anything at all, which with Wes could go either way.

What I see is his hand, closing around hers for a second, pressing something small into her palm, and then he’s already turning away, already walking back toward the equipment room like the moment’s finished before it started.

She stands there looking down at whatever it is.

I don’t ask him either. I catch his eye on his way past me, and he doesn’t explain, doesn’t need to, just gives me the smallest possible nod.

I glance back at her. She’s closed her hand around it now, whatever it was, and she’s still standing there at the door a moment longer than the moment requires.

Three of us, I think, carrying the box back to the storage rack.

Three different men asking the same question three different ways in one morning.

I see the third one through the gap in the stairwell door, on my way up for more folding tables.

Grant and Noelle at the window at the end of the hall, the one that looks down over the street, not touching but just close.

I don’t hear what he’s saying. I don’t need to.

I’ve watched that man hold himself at a distance from every good thing in his life for six years, and I’ve watched him stop doing it exactly once, on Christmas Eve, in a kitchen that used to have a wall of space in it where his self-control lived.

He’s not holding that distance now.

I don’t linger. I grab my tables and head back down.

By evening we’re all four in the kitchen, and it’s Danny, actually, who lights the fuse.

“So,” he says, apropos of absolutely nothing, setting down his coffee, “which room’s she sleeping in, permanently, I mean, once the mezzanine renovation’s done? Because the contractor’s asking, and I told him I didn’t know, on account of nobody around here saying it plain.”

The kitchen goes quiet in the specific way a room goes quiet when someone’s finally said the thing everyone’s been circling.

Wes doesn’t look up from what he’s doing, but something in the set of his shoulders shifts, waiting. Grant’s jaw works once. Noelle goes very still in her chair, coffee mug halfway to her mouth.