Page 11 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I put my hand flat over the marks. The paint is cool.

There's a version of this frame in Chicago that never got started. A doorframe in an apartment that isn't there anymore, waiting on a little girl who never got measured once.

I take my hand off the wall and don't look at it again.

My trophies are still on the shelf in my old room. District champs. Regional. A plastic gold man frozen mid-tackle for going on twenty years. There's a picture wedged in the mirror frame, me and Tater at seventeen, arms slung over shoulders, dumb as fence posts and happy about it.

Everybody in this house is gone. That's the roll call, standing in the doorway of my parents' room. Mom's reading glasses still on the nightstand. Gone, gone, gone, and here I am, the one who leaves and comes back too late.

I make up my old bed with sheets that smell like lemons from the closet. Sit on the edge of it. Take the chain off over my head.

Claire's ring catches the lamp light. Small gold circle. She had small hands and cold feet and a laugh that ran ahead of her jokes.

I hang the chain on the bedpost. That's the healthy thing, right? That's what the department shrink would say. Small steps.

I lie down. Stare at the ceiling.

The ceiling fan ticks. Somewhere outside a coyote starts up and another one answers.

The department shrink used to say. You don't put the weight down all at once. You set it down a little at a time.

Fine. It's four feet away. It's on the bedpost. It's not gone, it's right there.

I count the fan blades going around. I name the probies' problems. I run the pump panel on a twenty-six-year-old engine in my head, every gauge, every valve.

Four minutes. Maybe five.

I sit up and put the chain back around my neck.

The ring settles against my sternum where it's lived for two years, and only then does my chest unlock enough to breathe.

Small steps. Sure.

Sleep comes late and leaves early. In the gray before dawn, I carry my coffee out to the truck to drive nowhere in particular, and the radio comes on with the engine, some morning show, some laughing DJ, nothing, it's nothing, and my hand comes down on the steering wheel hard enough to split the skin over one knuckle.

The horn bleats. A dove lifts off the fence line.

I sit there breathing hard with blood on my hand over absolutely nothing. That's the part nobody tells you about grief. It stops announcing itself. It stops needing a reason. It waits in the truck with you.

"Okay," I say out loud, to nobody, to her. "Okay."

I wrap my knuckle in a napkin from the glove box and drive to the feed store for light bulbs, because that's a thing a functioning man does, and if I do enough functioning-man things in a row maybe I'll pass for one.

***

Monday morning, Station 1 smells like every station I've ever known. Diesel and coffee and bleach and rubber. My shoulders drop an inch before I clear the bay door. Traitors.

The engine's parked in the first bay and Tater wasn't lying. Twenty-six years old and every one of them showing. Somebody's kept her polished, but polish don't fix a pump.

"Peterson." Chief Weyland comes out of his office with a hand out. He was a captain when I was in high school, sneaking us into the station to slide the pole. Gray now. Same handshake, like getting caught in machinery. "Heard about Route 9. Hell of a first day back."

"Just held a line, Chief."

"Uh-huh. Amos Kessler tells it different, and Amos ain't quit telling it."

Amos ain't quit telling it. Which means the whole hospital's heard it by now. Which means she's heard it.

I don't know why that thought shows up or why it stands there with its hands in its pockets like it's got business here. I run it off.