Page 3 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Sundays were pancakes. That was her law, handed down like scripture. Didn't matter if I'd worked a twenty-four, didn't matter if the Bears were losing, Sunday morning was flour on the counter and batter on the ceiling because she never once in her life put the mixer on low first.

She had cold feet. All year. She'd shove them against my calves in bed and I'd holler and she'd say, "You run into burning buildings, Owen, you can handle my feet."

She kept a list on the fridge called Things Owen Was Wrong About. Dated. Numbered. Laminated after the first year, because, she said, this was a permanent collection now. Item fourteen was the time I swore the recipe said one cup of salt and defended it to the death. Item one was "that I would ever say yes to him."

I'd have argued item one. But she put it first so I couldn't, because you can't fight a laminated document, and she knew it, and she grinned at me every single time she added an entry.

The sonogram went up on the fridge in March. Held by a magnet shaped like a pineapple. Grainy little photo, looked like weather radar to me.

She took my hand one night on the couch and put my palm flat against her belly, low, and held it there.

"Say hi to your daughter, Owen."

A daughter.

We picked the name in a diner booth, arguing over a laminated menu. She wanted something old-fashioned. I wanted something that couldn't be turned into a nickname by middle school boys. We landed on Rosie and she cried into her hash browns and blamed the hormones, and I sat there in that sticky booth thinking no man in history had ever been this lucky, and someone should probably check my math.

Rosie.

I pass a sign that says SPRINGFIELD 22 and I try to say it out loud. Once. To nobody.

It doesn't come. Two years, and her name still won't come out of me.

***

The motel that night is off the highway outside Joplin. Forty-nine dollars. The AC unit rattles like it's got a bolt loose and the bedspread has cigarette burns older than me.

I lie on top of the covers with my boots on and watch headlights sweep across the ceiling.

I don't sleep. I didn't figure I would.

At some point after two I take the chain off and hold the ring in my fist and I let myself do the thing I ration out, the remembering, because if I did it all the time I'd never do anything else.

***

The tones dropped at 9:47 on a Tuesday night. Structure fire, multiple calls, working fire on arrival of first-due companies.

We were on the far side of the city covering another company's territory. The address came over the radio.

My address.

The rig went quiet all at once. Six men and no sound but the engine. Nobody looked at me and everybody looked at me, the way you look at a man on the edge of a roof, careful, sideways, ready to grab.

Beck said, "Owen." Once. That's all he had.

Rodriguez didn't ask. He flipped the lights and put his foot down and ran it, every red, the whole way across Chicago.

And the radio kept talking.

First-due on scene, heavy smoke showing. Give me a box alarm.

Companies going enroute. A battalion chief taking command. The dispatcher's voice flat and even, reading it out like a grocery list.

Fire through the roof, third floor. Strike a second alarm.

Third floor.

I was doing the math out loud by then. I didn't know I was doing it out loud until Beck put his hand on my shoulder and left it there. Eleven minutes out. Nine. Seven. Every transmission made the seven minutes longer.