Page 4 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Second-due reporting primary search on floors one and two negative.

One and two. Nobody said three. Nobody was saying three, and every man on that rig knew what it meant that nobody was saying three.

It wasn't enough.

It was never going to be enough. It was over before we cleared the first intersection. I know that now. I've driven that route ten thousand times in my head, every version, every light green instead of red, and I never get there. Not once.

Third floor was fully involved when we pulled up. My floor. Our windows.

I remember the truck company's ladder in the wrong place. I remember grabbing a halligan. I remember hands on me, a lot of hands, Rodriguez and Beck and a battalion chief I'd never met, and I remember fighting them. I put Beck on the ground. Beck, who stood up at my wedding.

They carried me out of the lobby of my own building. Four of them. I was screaming her name and part of me knows the whole block heard it and I have never once cared.

I woke up on a gurney in the back of an ambulance with an IV in my arm and a chaplain sitting where a paramedic should be.

You know what a chaplain's face means. Every firefighter knows what a chaplain's face means.

He said my name, gentle, like it was made of glass.

I don't remember the next four days. People tell me I was there. The service. One casket, regular size, like she was the only one in it. She wasn't.

The question came later, at the monument place. The man there was gentle as the chaplain. Did I want the second name carved. She hadn't been born yet, he said, careful, and some families choose to leave it.

I couldn't answer. Rodriguez answered for me.

Both names. Of course both names.

One casket. Two names on the stone.

Morning comes up gray over Joplin. I buy coffee from a machine and pour it out after one sip and drive.

Oklahoma. Then Texas, finally, the land opening up big and dry and familiar in a way I feel in my back teeth. I grew up out here. Left at twenty-two like the place was on fire behind me. Funny.

The interstates give way to state highways. The state highways give way to two-lane farm roads with grass growing up through the shoulder cracks. Hay bales. Cattle standing in tank ponds up to their bellies. A hand-painted sign for peaches, three miles ahead on the right.

My phone's got a text from Tater from an hour ago. YOU CLOSE? DEBBIE'S MAKING A BRISKET AND WON'T LET ME NEAR IT. SAYS IT'S FOR YOU. HURRY UP SO I CAN EAT.

I don't answer. He knows I'm close. He's got some cousin at the county line probably calling in my position like it's a manhunt.

The sun's dropping into that late-afternoon slant that turns everything gold and long-shadowed, and I come around the bend past the Baptist church and there it is.

WELCOME TO WILLOWBEND. Pop. 3,847. The sign's been repainted since I left. Somebody added a little firehouse to the mural on it, right between the water tower and the courthouse.

The ring sits against my sternum, warm from my skin.

Ninety days. Get my head right. Go back.

I say it like a man saying grace over food he doesn't plan to eat.

Main Street rolls past the windshield. String lights over the road, up year-round like always. The Willow Mug with its window fogged. Petals and Blooms with buckets of sunflowers out front.

The Baptist church marquee says GOD RECYCLES. HE MAKES NEW THINGS FROM BROKEN ONES. I look away from that one.

Outside the feed store, an old man in a Briggs Catfish Farm cap squints at my truck, then straightens up like he's seen a ghost. His mouth moves. I can read it through the glass. That's the Peterson boy.

By supper it'll be all over town. The Peterson boy's back. Half of them won't know from what. The other half will know exactly, because news finds Willowbend even when Willowbend isn't looking for it, and they'll have decided how to treat me before I unpack the truck. Casseroles are probably already thawing.

A woman I don't recognize waves at my truck on pure reflex, waving at anything that moves, the way small towns do. I lift two fingers off the wheel. Muscle memory. Twelve years gone and my hand still knows the wave.