Page 24 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

We break for lunch in a stand of shade near a spot Ivy must have known would be here, because she led us straight to it without checking a map. Everyone drops where they land.

I sit near Ivy. She's got dirt on her forearms and a scrape along one knuckle she hasn't seemed to notice. She's eating like someone who spent the whole morning burning through calories she intends to replace immediately. It's a small thing, but it fits everything else I've noticed about her today — no wasted motion, no self-consciousness, just doing what the day requires and moving on.

The trail gives us one more problem before the day's done. A section farther along has washed out worse than expected, drainage clogged, dirt cut through in a channel that's only going to get worse with the next storm. Russ crouches at the edge of it, frowning.

“This wasn't here last month.”

“Runoff's been bad this spring,” Ivy says. “There's a spot about a quarter mile back that does the same thing. We rerouted the water there two summers ago.”

“Can we make the same fix here?” I ask.

She looks at the channel, at the slope above it, at where the water's clearly cutting through. “Close. The grade's different here.”

I walk the edge of it, looking at it the way I'd look at a fire line, thinking about where we’d prefer the water go versus where it's currently going. “If you cut the drain here instead of there, you're working with the slope instead of against it.”

Ivy looks where I'm pointing. Considers it. “That could work.”

It takes the rest of the crew and the better part of two hours, but it works. Rock, debris, a rerouted channel, a trail that isn't actively eroding itself into the hillside anymore. No one person did it. Everyone helped. I'm starting to understand, that's how it goes out here. Nobody solves anything alone.

By the time we're hiking out, I'm tired in a way that comes from a full day of physical labor that isn't the labor I’m used to. Different muscles complaining than the ones I know how to argue with.

Ivy falls into step beside me. “Well?”

I know what she's asking. “I'll give you Monday.”

“Generous.”

“Don't get used to it.”

She smiles but doesn't say anything else.

Back at the crew house boots come off by the door in an increasingly chaotic pile. Somebody wins the shower argument through sheer speed rather than seniority. Dinner is loud, fast, and involves more food than should reasonably disappear in twenty minutes. Someone makes a giant pot of pasta. Someone else burns garlic bread, but nobody complains because we're all too hungry to care.

After dinner, Tessa produces a deck of cards like she's been waiting all day for an excuse.

“There's no TV in this house,” Tessa tells me.

“There's no reliable Wi-Fi either,” Dani says, not looking up from dealing. “Except sometimes, right by the porch window, if you hold your phone at the correct angle and pray.”

“That's a real thing?”

“Cassidy got two bars there once. We still talk about it,” Trevor says.

Cards, it turns out, fill the gap just fine. The game is simple enough to play half-focused but complicated enough to argue about, which seems to be the requirement for a house full of exhausted people who still want to hang out with each other. Ivy plays like she plays everything else. Focused, a little ruthless, unbothered by Reid's increasingly desperate attempts to read her face for tells.

“You're bluffing,” he says.

“Prove it.”

He can't. He never can. I'm starting to understand this about her too.

Somewhere in the third round, Tessa says, “We're going dancing Friday.”

“We haven't even gotten to Tuesday yet,” Dani points out.

Tessa lets out a long breath. “I'm aware. Thinking about Friday is how I make it through the week.”

Nobody seems surprised by any of this. Apparently Friday nights at some bar in Timber Creek are a known quantity around here. Country music and dancing and whatever else happens when this crew gets a night off.