Page 93 of Christmas with Three Firemen

“Every December. Since I was nine.” I fold the card back along its worn crease. “Don’t really know why I read them here instead of somewhere private. Guess this building’s felt like somewhere private for a while now.”

She’s quiet for a second.

“Can I see?”

I hand her the card. She reads it slowly, careful with it the way you’re careful with something that matters more than its physical weight suggests, and hands it back without commentary, which is exactly right, exactly what the moment needed. Some things don’t need a response. They just need someone else to hold them for a second.

We go back to framing after that.

***

I’m at the workbench a few feet off, running conduit, and I catch her in glances between cuts. Page turning. Then no page turning for a while. Her hand flat on the paper, not moving.

I set the wire down.

She’s still sitting there when I look again, the report closed on her knee, both hands resting on top of it.

I go back to my framing and she sits with the report a while longer, and eventually picks the hammer back up, and comes back to the wall we’ve been building together, and that’s the whole conversation. We don’t need more than that.

By evening, the north wall stands framed and half-wired, farther along than the contractors expected for one day’s work, and the neighborhood starts packing up its tools and coolers, calling out goodnights, promising to come back tomorrow whether anyone asks them to or not.

I stay after most people have gone, running the last few wire drops by headlamp because the quiet suits the work.

A building isn’t really that different from a person.

You can burn part of it down to the studs, and it’s still the same structure underneath, still holding the same shape, still capable of standing exactly where it always stood. You just have to be willing to open up the walls, see what’s actually wrong with the wiring, and run it clean.

Most people never let anyone open the walls. They just patch over the damage and hope the next fire doesn’t find the same weak spot.

I look at the framing Noelle and I put up together this morning, straight and level and load-bearing, exactly as strong as anything that was here before. Stronger, probably. New wood doesn’t carry the same old cracks.

I turn off my headlamp and stand in the dark for a second, listening to the building settle the way it always settles at the end of a long day, and I think, in the plain way I think most things, that some structures don’t just survive what happens to them.

They come out of it better built than they started.

Chapter thirty

Chapter Thirty: Grant

One Year Later

I wake before any of them, same as always, some habit built into me by two decades of shifts that start whether or not the body agrees to it.

For a moment I just lie still and take stock of the room, which has become a different kind of exercise than it used to be.

Mateo’s arm is thrown across Noelle’s waist, his face pressed into the pillow with the total surrender of a man who sleeps like it’s a competitive sport.

Wes is on her other side, on his back, one hand loosely curled near hers on the mattress, and even asleep there’s something alert about him, some part of him permanently on watch even here, even now.

And Noelle, in the middle of both of them, breathing slow and even, her hair a wild spread of red against the pillow, one hand resting flat against her own sternum like she’s checking that it’s still rising and falling on its own.

I lie there and look at this, at all of it, and think about how a man spends twenty years building himself into someone who doesn’t let himself want things, and then wakes up on a Christmas morning in the middle of exactly the thing he spent twenty years refusing to want, and finds that none of the old rules apply anymore. There’s no protocol for this. I checked. I looked for years.

I get up carefully, so as not to wake them, and go downstairs, because someone has to start the coffee, and because I need a minute in my own head before this house wakes up and takes it from me the way it takes everything now, freely, generously, without asking permission.

By the time the others surface, the kitchen has already descended into its particular kind of chaos.

Mateo’s making pancakes and singing along to a radio station playing the same twelve Christmas songs it’s played all December, off-key on purpose because he thinks it’s funnier that way.