Page 83 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

The truth sits up in my throat and looks around.

I swallow it back down. Old habit. Best trained muscle I own.

"Help me carry boxes," I say, "or go home."

She helps me carry boxes. That's Debbie Sue Monroe for you. She'll fight you to the last ditch and then hold your ladder while you climb down into it.

We go back and forth to the car in the dark, both of us crying and neither of us saying so. On the last trip her tote bag tips off the porch rail, keys and gum and the twins' fruit snacks scattering, a curl of paper skating under the bench, and she's on her knees cussing and scooping it all back in the dark with her arms already full.

At the car she hugs me so hard my ribs complain.

"I hate this," she says into my hair.

"I know."

"I'm keeping your secret and I hate that too."

"I know."

She pulls back and holds my face in both hands, and for a second she looks so much like somebody's mother that it hurts, because I never had the kind that looked at me like this.

"You call me," she says. "Every town. Every doctor visit. I get pictures of that baby or I swear on my twins I will hunt you across state lines."

"Deal."

She stands in my driveway while I go back inside for the last of it. I strip the bed. I wipe down the counters. I take the whiteboard off the wall, and my marker hovers over it a long minute.

I erase MEDS. I erase the tally. I leave one thing, small, in the corner, in my handwriting.

angry sunshine was a good look on you.

Then I put my keys on the counter for the landlord. I pull the flannel on over my shirt, because the dark is cold, and that's the lie I'm telling tonight.

I pick up the last box. The one that's been packed since the day I moved in. The one I keep so leaving stays easy.

It has never been this heavy.

***

Four a.m., and Willowbend slides past my windows for the last time.

The mill is still smoking out on River Road, a gray column against a graying sky, and I make myself look at it. There's the thing you love, Nellie. That's what it does. It burns, and he runs at it.

Starlight Hall floats by on my left, dark and quiet, roof shut tight over all those painted stars.

Then the sign. WELCOME TO WILLOWBEND in my rearview mirror, spelled backward, which feels about right.

I make it a quarter mile past the town line before my hands quit on me.

I pull onto the shoulder and put it in park and sob with my forehead on the wheel and my hand pressed flat over my stomach, and I say it out loud to the empty car because I need to hear how it sounds.

"I'm doing this for him."

The words sit in the dark and wait.

And God help me, it sounds exactly like my mother. Every packed car of my childhood. Every new town, every new school, every man she swore she was leaving for our own good. It's for the best, Nellie-girl. You'll understand when you're older.

I'm older.