Falling for the Fireman

by Allie Pleiter

  “If? Not when?”

  “Let’s just say I’m not ready to consider the prospect of Nicky having a girlfriend.”

  “Ever?”

  “Well, maybe when he turns twenty-five. I want grandchildren eventually, just not this decade.”

  “And you’re trying to change the subject on me. We were talking about you. You and Chad Owens, specifically. Don’t try to deny there’s something there. It’s all over your face and you’re the worst liar I know.”

  She gave Abby her best glare. “I’ll admit, he surprised me. He’s much kinder than he lets on, and he’s been great to Nicky. But that’s all.”

  Abby put down her fork and blew a curl out of her eyes. “Please. That’s the farthest thing from ‘all’ I’ve seen all year. Why are you hiding it, resisting it like it’s something bad? It could be something good. Really good.” She picked up her fork again, spearing her waffle with conspiratorial glee. “You know, I’d written him off as too sulky for the likes of you, but I guess I was wrong.” She narrowed her eyes, leaning forward with both elbows on the table. “Don’t see him in church, though, so we might have to work on that.”

  “Abby…”

  “Now you stop it. I refuse to sit there and let my best friend stay miserable. And you are. You paste a big smile over it, but you are. After all you’ve been through, what’s so wrong about a little happiness?”

  Jeannie took a breath to refute it all, but Abby held up a silencing finger. Her voice grew tender. “Frank and I loved Henry, we really did, but you and Nicky have been alone a long time. Maybe it’s time to rebuild more than the store.”

  “Look, even if I was interested…”

  “Will you cut this out? You are,” Abby corrected relentlessly.

  Jeannie put her hands up. “Even if I was a tiny bit interested…”

  “Not so tiny…”

  “…this is absolutely not the time,” Jeannie cut her off. “There’s too much going on. I’m pulled in a dozen different directions right now. My attention needs to be on getting Sweet Treats open as fast as possible so that Nicky and I can feel like we have our lives back.”

  That shut Abby up for all of ten seconds. She didn’t even make it through buttering her toast before her next words bubbled up out of her. “You ever think he might be able to help you with that?”

  “Help? We’re talking about the man who has asked to see three different sets of plans on the store already. I don’t need a watchdog looking over my shoulder.”

  Jeannie reached into her handbag for her wallet and spied the box of birthday candles still in there. She flushed, remembering how Chad had helped her light the match. Her skin tingled at the memory of his hand on hers.

  “Whoa. You want to tell me what that was all about?”

  “What?” Jeannie panicked. Had she been that obvious?

  “That look you just got. Something did happen. Something so something you weren’t even going to tell me about it.”

  Jeannie’s only hope was to try and tell the facts without sending Abby into full-blown Cupid mode. “He helped me light a match. I’ve been…afraid to lately. It’s silly, really. He walked me through it, and, well, I suppose there was something there when he touched me.”

  Abby’s eyes grew wide.

  “See?” Jeannie pointed at her friend. “That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you. I knew you’d get like this.”

  “Like what? Happy? For my best friend? The horror!” Abby began cutting up her waffle, humming along with the country music playing in the restaurant. She had the look of someone who had just latched onto a wonderful plan and was already dreaming up ways to get started.

  “I know that look, Abby. That look sent me to two pathetic ‘older singles’ Bible studies and on those awful dates with Frank’s boring accountant colleagues.” That look also announced a target had been acquired by one of nature’s unstoppable forces.

  “You want to know what I think?”

  No, she didn’t, but Jeannie knew it wasn’t really a question. She steeled herself, took a sip of her coffee and prayed for grace.

  “I think you’ve forgotten the difference between a watchdog and someone to watch over you.”

  Why was Abby so good at saying exactly the thing to get under her defenses? Jeannie thought about Chad, and the way he’d pulled her out of the street in front of the firehouse. Somehow he’d taken command but not taken over. “Okay, maybe his attention really is genuine concern, and not authority. And yes, something is there.” There was, and it was frighteningly strong.

  “And then there is his connection with Nicky. He was right, wasn’t he, about stopping you from rushing over to the school?”

  “All right, yes,” Jeannie admitted. “It would have made things worse if I’d rushed over there. Nicky made it quite clear he would have ‘died of embarrassment’ if I’d showed up.”

  “So, he’s a good man. Hard to find these days.”

  “But he’s so sad. There were good reasons not to get involved with a guy like that. All that unresolved dark side. Don’t you think I’ve got enough of my own baggage to worry about without adding a brooding fire marshal?” It was a pathetic barrier but it was the best she could come up with in her confusion.

  The Abby Reed Force of Nature smiled back at her. Abby swirled a bit of waffle into a puddle of syrup with a gesture entirely too close to a victory lap. “Only one way to find out. And you want to find out. You’re just not quite ready to admit it yet.”

  That was so close to the truth that Jeannie choked on her reply. Thankfully, Abby backed off after that, moving on to other topics like Thanksgiving plans and the endless exploits of Abby’s high-school senior son. Jeannie hoped the matter had been put to rest, if only temporarily, but as they were paying their bill Abby winked and asked, “So, when are you going to ask him to church?”

  “Who?”

  “You know very well who. When are you going to ask Chad Owens to church?”

  Jeannie slipped her change into her yellow patent-leather wallet with a forced apathy. “I have no plans to ask Chad Owens to church. You’re chair of the outreach committee, so why don’t you ask Chad Owens to church?”

  Not that Jeannie really thought that would end it, but Abby did take her outreach committee tasks of “head inviter” very seriously. There were very few folks in Gordon Falls Abby hadn’t cajoled, invited or outright dragged into a church service. “Because,” she said with a too-wide smile, “I’ll be busy asking him to dinner Saturday night.”

  Jeannie balked. “But that’s when Nicky and I are coming to dinner…” She didn’t even get to the end of the sentence.

  And so it began.

  Somewhere in between the last smoke detector and the first match, Jeannie knew there was never any hope of stopping it in the first place.

  Poor Chad. He’d never know what hit him.

  Chapter Eight

  This year’s box had arrived.

  Chad looked at it, running his fingers across the Chinese characters that covered the outside of the package. Laurie’s mother was Chinese—Laurie’s middle name had been Li-Fen—and sent one of these every year around the anniversary of Laurie’s death. Her family had always managed a harmonious mix of Chinese and American cultures, as Laurie’s dad, Tony, had been a missionary in China when the couple met. Laurie’s mother, Huifen, or “Helen” as she called herself in the States, showed up on Chad’s doorstep one fall day with the initial box.

  “These are Chinese sky lanterns,” she had declared in her clipped speech, holding up what looked like a yellow paper balloon. “In China they are used at a festival in February, but we will use them now to remember Laurie.” Laurie’s family grafted a host of Chinese traditions into their strong Christian beliefs—“hybrids” Laurie had called them in her botanical nomenclature.

  “Helen,” he’d replied, “thanks for thinking of me, but please, I don’t need this. I don’t want this.”

  “You are young and grieving. How
do you know what you need?” She had ignored his protests and deposited the box on his kitchen table. “These lanterns symbolize how our prayers send wishes to Heaven. They suit you. Centuries of Chinese have used lanterns to signal a return to safety.”

  Chad supposed it wasn’t a bad impulse—Laurie probably would have loved it—but he didn’t find the idea comforting in the slightest. He found it overblown and theatrical, but didn’t say that out of respect for the woman who would have been his mother-in-law. She’d left the box with him, and Chad thought that would be the end of it.

  Until Helen returned the next year with another box. “You need closure. This will give you closure,” she’d proclaimed despite Chad refusing her as kindly as he knew how.

  “I am not the kind of man who’s going to find closure lighting paper lanterns and sending them up into the sky.”

  Helen had only smiled and continued her annual campaign, sending a box every fall since.

  She hadn’t succeeded. The arrival of Helen’s box never signaled safety; it only marked the beginning of his cold sadness, the start of grappling his way through another holiday season alone.

  Chad put the box into his truck, thinking maybe this year he’d bring it to the firehouse and find someone who’d enjoy the lanterns rather than stack them up with the other seven boxes in his garage. No sense letting something Helen had ordered all the way from China go to waste. Now that he thought of it, the whole charade reminded him of Jeannie’s thing with the birthday candle—maybe she’d find a use for the lanterns.

  Jeannie was finding her way into his thoughts constantly. He didn’t know what to do with that, or what to do with the way his mind kept pulling back to the look in her eyes when she finally lit that silly candle. Something so ridiculous shouldn’t have been nearly so satisfying, but he’d felt downright victorious when she’d blown the candle out. As if he’d managed to restore something important for her. He didn’t know what to do with that, either.

  He surprised himself when he went back into the house by doing something he hadn’t done in years. Chad went to his closet and pulled down an aged manilla envelope. The paper was growing crisp and yellowing with time. Unwinding the red string closure, he could barely read the penciled October date in the upper right-hand corner. It was the only thing identifying the package. A date was all he could manage at the time. He couldn’t even bear to write her name on it. It wasn’t as if anyone else needed to be able to find it, and he’d never forget what it was or why it stayed on the top shelf of his closet.

  The first page to slide out was the insurance company’s “Incident Report.” He’d always found that title insulting. “Incidents” were things like tripping over a curb or bumping someone’s fender in the grocery store parking lot. This was a tragedy. That had been the word he used to describe the fire that took Laurie’s life, and not for dramatic purposes. The day after the funeral, it had come to him from out of his memory.

  “Oedipus Rex,” his high school English teacher had said, “is a true tragedy.”

  “Are there false ones?” Chad had asked, more to mouth off than out of genuine curiosity.

  “There are sad stories,” the teacher had continued, “but they are not tragedies. Something tremendously sad becomes a tragedy when it doesn’t have to happen.”

  Laurie’s death didn’t have to happen.

  Chad felt like that condemnation had been scratched into his chest with a dull knife over and over for years. How many times had he chided Laurie for always climbing where she shouldn’t in search of this plant and that? Laurie dove into nature—into life—with an abandon that made him crazy. If he’d ever thought she’d meet an early end, it would be falling from a tree or slipping down a cliff—something heroic out in nature’s glory.

  A space heater and branches of dried oak were neither dramatic nor glorious. They were stupid, preventable and ridiculously mundane. “Dried botanical specimens” were essentially kindling. What haunted Chad some nights when he couldn’t sleep was how many times he’d thought to check the batteries in Laurie’s smoke alarms but never actually done it. He hadn’t even known she’d been taking sleeping pills—she’d been nervous about the wedding plans but never told him it had kept her awake at night.

  On good nights he could console himself that she died in her sleep, peaceful and dreaming of the bright future they planned together. On the bad nights, he imagined her scrambling and coughing, flailing for a doorway too hidden by thick black smoke. Calling out his name to come and save her. George’s son, Clark, one of Chad’s closest friends at the time, had been the one to identify her engagement ring still on her charred finger. The coroner had refused to let him view the body, saying it would be too difficult an image to carry for the rest of his life.

  He didn’t see how it could be any worse than the visions he saw in the dark.

  Laurie’s engagement ring, still in the plastic bag from the funeral home, slid out of the envelope to ping softly on the table. Tony had a grieving father’s tears in his eyes when he gave it back to Chad.

  “I don’t want it. It belongs on Laurie’s finger.”

  “We chose to cremate her,” Tony said. His face had aged decades in the few days since his daughter’s death. “We thought we’d spread her ashes at the botanical garden. It suits her, surely you can see that. Take the ring, Chad. It should be yours.”

  Chad could never bring himself to take the ring out of the plastic bag, to touch something that had touched her for so long, for some irrational fear he’d wipe away her essence with his guilty fingertips.

  He should have been able to do something. Anything. How many times had he seen the clutter of her cottage and convinced himself it was her vitality, her creativity spilling out everywhere? How many times had he swallowed this warning or that, unable to endure the disappointed look her carefree spirit would give him. “Oh, you,” she would always say when he suggested wiser courses of action for this or that. And then she would shrug her delicate shoulders, give him a tender smile and kiss his forehead or something romantic like that. Seconds later—or sometimes many kisses later—she would be fluttering off to her next creative venture, leaving him to catch up. If God had ever really made wood nymphs, Laurie would have been one.

  God. Now there was a thought he’d not held in years. Laurie believed death led to a better place. She’d seen God’s glory splashed all over nature, to hear her describe the world around her. Her parents had rock-solid faith, and they’d raised her to see God in everything and everyone.

  Jeannie Nelworth was like that. In all the chaos that engulfed her, she never acted like God had turned His back on her. She’d lost even more than Chad had—widowed before thirty seemed especially cruel, and yet kept her faith and perhaps even deepened it. Whatever faith Chad possessed had left him when Laurie did, as if the faith had never really been his, only borrowed from Laurie and yanked back when she died. Jeannie had that infectious zest for life that had drawn him to Laurie.

  A birthday candle. The woman kept birthday candles in her handbag, for crying out loud, as if life could serve up a surprise celebration at any moment. Had he even celebrated his last birthday?

  What had he overheard Abby Reed calling him? A “sourpuss”?

  He looked at their engagement photograph, pained to see a rugged, hopeful, younger version of himself with his arm firmly around Laurie. That man was no sourpuss.

  “You are now,” Laurie’s almond eyes said to him from the photograph. It seemed so real that he actually shivered. “Don’t be,” she would have said, then touched his hair and wandered off.

  Jeannie had touched his arm just as gently, and it had blasted through him, startling as it was soft. She must have known.

  He collected the items back into their envelope. Before he even thought about what it meant, he took the yellow sparkly pen off his desk and wrote “Laurie’s things” on the envelope. Gave it a name instead of a cold, clinical date. Laurie would probably have liked that some of the spark
le came off onto the envelope. And for the first time, Chad didn’t hold his breath as he slid it back into its protected corner of his closet.

  Jeannie nearly dropped the phone. “He what?”

  “I know.” Mrs. Hunnington thankfully sounded as shocked as Jeannie felt. Jeannie was not in the habit of getting calls from the school principal. “It’s not like Nicholas to get into that big of a fight.”

  Jeannie sat down at her wobbly, borrowed kitchenette table, still in her pajamas. She looked at the oven clock—so old the clock still had hands, not digits—because she’d been cleaning all morning and hadn’t even put on her watch. It was nine forty-five. Nicky had been in school for what? Two hours?

  Something in Mrs. Hunnington’s words caught her attention. “What do you mean ‘that big of a fight’? Has he been in fights before?”

  Mrs. Hunnington’s sigh said too much. “Not really. Scuffles are a part of boys’ lives at this age. There are days where we rival Animal Planet over here, so normally we don’t call parents unless there’s a point of concern.”

  A point of concern? Jeannie popped back off the ripped vinyl chair to head into her bedroom. “I find any fight of Nicky’s concerning.” She pulled open the flimsy folding panels of her closet door to rummage through the laundry for the jeans she’d worn yesterday. “You know everything he’s been through,” she defended as she started yanking them on. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Actually,” Mrs. Hunnington began. Her hesitant tone made Jeannie pause. “I’d call Mark Billings before you come over.”

  Mark Billings? The dentist? Jeannie let the pant leg fall loose around her calf. “Why?” She didn’t really need to ask.

  “Well, it seems Nicholas got a tooth knocked loose.”

  The thought of anyone knocking into her boy hard enough to dislodge a tooth launched Jeannie into a protective mother’s rage. “What on earth happened over there?”

  “The other fellow has a serious black eye, so we’re still working out who started it and why. They’re both banged up.”