Page 49 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Receipt two is the ledger open next to my coffee. The auction cleared the down payment on the new engine with room to spare. Grant Walker's match came through Friday, and Chief Weyland got choked up on the phone, and I pretended not to hear it, which is the polite thing.

Receipt three isn't on paper. Receipt three is limping around Juniper Lane in a walking boot.

The firefighter and the nurse. He's healing up at her cottage where the whole town can see, and Debbie Sue reports she confiscated his crutches twice for cheating. June's betting pool has a date on it now. I put five dollars on the festival.

Half this town thinks I engineered it. I let them think it. But the truth is better than the rumor: I got a front-row seat to the best match in three counties, and for once I didn't have to do a lick of the work.

But I'll say this much. If either one of them had ever walked into my office, I'd have put those two files together before the coffee cooled. Half the county has told me about the fights at that hospital, and stories are stories. Testimony. I never bought a word of the telling.

What I bought was auction night. When that spotlight swung to her, I wasn't watching her. I was watching him. A man on a stage in front of three hundred people, and his eyes went one place and stayed there.

People argue with strangers. They only look for one person when a door opens. Eleven years, eleven couples, not one divorce, and those two would've made twelve easy, if they'd needed me. They don't, and I find I don't mind a bit.

Even my little porch speech to Gran has started feeling silly. It's going too well. I keep waiting for the other shoe. Six weeks ago I said that to a tree, and a bird laughed at me, and I let it mean something.

Shoes stay on feet, Gran. Mostly.

I rinse my mug, grab the ledger, and head for the council meeting. The engine numbers present at nine. It's Wednesday, eight forty, bright and ordinary, and I cut across the square the way I always do, past the Willow Mug, because June props the door and the whole street smells like pecan pie.

That's where I see him.

James. In the diner parking lot.

My whole face does what it always does when I spot him somewhere he doesn't know I am, which is go warm and pleased and a little dopey. My hand comes halfway up to wave.

Then the woman steps out from behind the ice machine, and my hand forgets what it was doing.

I don't know her. I know everybody. I don't know her.

Dark hair. A blazer that never hung on a rack in its life. I owned those shoes once, in Dallas, in another woman's closet in another woman's world. Behind her sits a silver car, low and foreign and quiet-looking, the kind of thing you couldn't get a hay bale into if you prayed over it.

It's fine. It's a client. Councilman business. Some Abilene something.

They're laughing. Her hand lands on his arm and stays. Stays like it knows the way.

It's fine.

Then she hugs him, and it is not fine, because it's not a church hug. It goes on. His chin comes down over her shoulder and his eyes close, and something in my chest steps wrong, like a stair I thought was there and isn't.

They part. She kisses one cheek. The other. Easy as breathing. Who kisses him like that. I kiss him like that.

And then she lays her palm flat against his cheek and holds it, and says something small, and I watch it land.

His face opens.

That's the only word I have for it. Opens. Goes soft and lit and young, like a porch light coming on in a house I've never been inside.

I've made a study of that man's face. The meeting face, the pie face, the face he makes at my door on Wednesdays. I thought I had the whole catalog.

He has never once looked at me like that.

The thought doesn't arrive like a case note. It arrives like a slap. I actually feel it in my teeth. My grip has gone tight on the ledger and I don't remember doing it, and Hank's barber pole is turning its slow red spiral six inches from my shoulder, and I am standing on a public sidewalk on a Tuesday learning something with no name yet.

She gets in the silver car. It rolls up Main, quiet as a secret.

And James watches it go. Hands in his pockets. Past the feed store. Past the bank. All the way out of sight, like the leaving is the part that costs him.

He doesn't watch me leave like that.