Until he heard the shouting from somewhere over his left shoulder.
Clark pulled himself out of his waterborne stupor to see a tiny calamity erupting on the riverbank. Two women trying to hold back an old man who was shouting and waving. He throttled back the boat to realize the old man was railing against him. It had been years since he’d heard any version of the “you speed-loving hooligan” shout but the recognition was instantaneous. What took a few seconds longer to process was the shock that the old man was standing in two feet of icy April river—and that the old man was Mort Wingate.
Chapter Six
Clark cut the engine back as far as possible while still turning the boat towards the commotion. Within ten seconds he was close enough to hear Melba’s frantic and embarrassed voice. “For goodness’ sake, Dad, come out of the water right now!”
“What’s the matter with you? Can’t a man feed the ducks in peace without some idiot racing down the river like there’s no tomorrow?” For an old, sick man, Mort was putting up a pretty good fight. The women couldn’t hold him back, and he’d gained another couple of inches into the water toward the boat as he kept shouting.
“Sorry!” Clark yelled, although it seemed useless. Melba and her friend were in the river up to their knees now, shouting and pulling on Mort’s waving arms. One slip and the three of them would be under the chilly waters—he couldn’t think of anything else to do but gun the engine and bring the boat up on shore beside them.
“Dad!” Melba shouted as Mort came right for Clark, who vaulted out of the boat in a splash of shockingly cold water and made the shore in three strides. Thankfully, his split-second plan worked, for Mort came right at him.
“You selfish rat! Don’t give a thought for anyone else around you, do you?”
“Sir...”
“Don’t you ‘sir’ me, you good-for-nothing...”
“Dad!” Melba’s voice was a shriek as Mort tripped. He would have landed full in the water had Clark not caught him at the last minute.
For whatever reason, the shock of nearly falling snapped Mort out of his rage. While he didn’t exactly calm, his tirade subsided. He pushed himself off Clark with a brusque, feisty anger and stomped up the riverbank, grumbling something Clark couldn’t make out. He was pretty sure he was better off not hearing.
“We should call an ambulance,” the blonde woman said more calmly than he would have thought.
“No,” Melba shot back. “I can get him home.”
Clark doubted that. In another split-second decision, he took off his jacket and tossed his cell phone to the blonde. “Hit speed-dial two...it’ll connect you to the fire station. Ask for Jesse Sykes and tell him to bring three rescue blankets.” He tossed the jacket to Melba, who was trying to guide her father to a nearby bench. “See if you can get this on him while I tie the boat up. I’d take his pulse, but I don’t think he’d let me near him.”
Mort glared at him, but it was a wounded, confused glare, which softened just a bit as Melba threw his coat over her father’s now-shivering shoulders. The look in the old man’s eyes told Clark even Mort himself wasn’t quite sure what had just happened. What an awful, tormented way to feel, Clark thought as he tugged the boat firmly up on the shore. To lose chunks of yourself right in front of your own eyes. I’d yell at someone, too.
By the time Jesse showed up with blankets, Melba and Charlotte—he’d learned the blonde’s name by then—had maneuvered an exhausted Mort into Melba’s car. Melba was spent, too. He watched her put her head down on the car roof for a weary second after shutting the backseat door.
“Here,” he said, picking up the sorry bag of old bread he’d found by the water’s edge. “I’m sorry I ruined your outing.”
“Duck feeding.” She rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” The futility in her tone cut into Clark’s gut.
“You were trying to have a nice moment with your dad.” Clark nodded back toward the boat. “A nice quiet moment I sort of...made impossible.”
“It’s not your fault. I don’t know why he did that.” She pulled her own coat closer around her. “I don’t know why he does much of anything anymore.”
Clark fought the urge to put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all going to be okay?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”
“Charlotte seems like a cool head in a tight spot.”
Melba glanced back at her friend, who was trying to engage Mort in friendly conversation in the car as if they’d just gone out for ice cream instead of staging a drama in icy river waters. “Charlotte? She’s great backup. She lost her grandfather to Alzheimer’s two years ago. She knows the drill.”
“It’s good to have backup.” There was a weird silence between them. He had the sensation of having seen too much of her life exposed. The awkwardness of knowing more than he ought to. It pulled at him, as did the astounding velvet-brown of her eyes, in ways that seemed so unwise. “Everybody needs backup.”
She noticed the shiver than ran down his back. In fact, his wet feet were so insanely cold they hurt. “And you need your coat back.”
She turned for the car door, but he caught her elbow. “No.” The moment, the touch, burned between them as if someone had just lit a torch. For a moment Clark forgot what he was going to say. Forgot the pins of pain attacking his soggy feet. Forgot why Melba Wingate was the perfect example of how he was so easily distracted. “You...um...just hang on to it for now.” He had to send a very specific mental command to his hand to unwrap itself from the tiny span of her forearm. “I’d see you all home, but I have to get this boat back. It’s not even mine—well, not yet, anyways. I’ll come by the house later this afternoon and make sure everyone’s okay. I can get it back then.”
She held up a cautionary hand. “I don’t think...”
“I’ll call your cell first to see if it’s a good time. You know, if he’s sleeping or something so I won’t get him all riled up again. I suspect he’s exhausted from all this.”
She pushed her hair back off her face again. “I know I am.” It was clear that she was hanging on by a thread when she did that. Under siege and yet courageous at the same time. It did something to him—pulled out urges to comfort and protect—that no amount of cautionary thinking could undo.
“Sometime around four, okay?”
“Yeah, that’s good. Barney’ll be there making dinner—she can keep an eye on Dad.” She fished into her coat pocket for her car keys.
“Hey.” He waited until she looked up at him. “I’ll show up this time. Promise.”
That got a smile from her. “Like my Dellio’s?”
“Tell you what—I’ll take you to Dellio’s and you can order whatever fungus you want.” That wasn’t the smartest of ideas, but he’d just ruined a quiet afternoon she’d probably planned for days with her dad. Exacerbating her problems was becoming a bad habit, even if he had no idea how he kept doing so. It was time he got something right in this town.
She hesitated. “Clark...”
Her near-sigh of his name was a fatal mistake. “Well, now you’ve done it. You take a man with hero tendencies—a firefighter, for example—you let him mess up on you not once but twice, and then you say his name like that? ‘No’ just left the list of viable options.” The fragile smile that crept across her face finished the job her sigh had started. He smiled and pointed at her. “I’ll see you at four.”
* * *
Melba should have stopped eating French fries twenty fries ago. “Are you going to buy that boat?”
Clark leaned back against the red vinyl booth as some 1950s baritone launched into another crooning oldies ballad. “I already did. Paid Max right there and then when I brought it back.”
“After everything that happened on the riverbank?” Sh
e hadn’t had “small talk” since forever, so she was grateful that Clark had kept the conversation away from Dad and their dramatic afternoon. But sooner or later, one of them had to bring it up. The elephant in the room couldn’t be ignored forever.
“I figure that boat and I have a history now.”
How did he do that? Treat such calamity as if it were amusing rather than unnerving?
“You make it sound like you couldn’t have planned a more entertaining afternoon.” The words came out with a tone of hurt she didn’t even realize was lurking inside. She had wanted it to be an entertaining afternoon, had hoped that it would be. She hadn’t realized Charlotte’s idea had sprung such a longing for the relationship she used to have with her father.
Clark doused his enormous hamburger with more ketchup. You could barely make out the fries under the red sea he’d already poured on them. “It will be a funny story. Just maybe not for another six years or so.”
“He’ll be long gone by then.” She gave a little gasp, surprised something so morbid had blurted out of her. Melba glanced up at Clark, expecting to see the same shock she felt, but his eyes were steady. An “it’s okay” silently reflected in their warm sadness. “Well, maybe not,” she covered with false cheer.
Clark set the ketchup bottle down. “Do you know how long he has?” His question had a careful, quiet tone. “Have they given you any idea?” Melba swallowed hard, and he broke off his gaze. “I’m sorry, that’s none of my business, is it?”
“No, it’s just that no one’s been...” it took her a second to find the right word “...brave enough to ask me that. Everyone talks around it, hints at it, but they never really ask. I mean, who wants to hear that answer?” She picked at a stray sesame seed that had fallen off her bun. “But I have to acknowledge it. It’s all I can ever think about, most days.” It was so much more than that. It touched every thought, every action, made everything that wasn’t about Dad—like having Dellio’s with Clark Bradens—feel selfish and wrong. Now had to be all about Dad, because maybe now was all she’d ever have.
Clark leaned forward a bit. She’d spent the last five minutes thinking his eyes couldn’t get any more intense, but she’d been wrong. “How do you think about it? I mean, how do you get your head around something so big as that?”
Melba didn’t really know how to explain it. This wasn’t like a work project, where she’d make a conscious decision to tackle a massive challenge. “It’s like having a ten-ton weight dumped on you a fraction at a time. You know it’s there, you see hints of it for a while and you pretend not to notice. You tell yourself it’s not really that heavy. Then something...cracks...and the whole ten tons of it falls around your ankles.” The metaphors seemed dumb and inaccurate, but it did feel good to at least try and put the experience into words. “I’m stuck trying to figure out how to live among the pieces, I suppose. Only they don’t hold together anymore, and I can feel the time running out between them. Like a leak you can’t stop.” She hadn’t planned on saying so much, but Clark’s eyes had a way of making her ease up on the tight grip she held around herself.
“I don’t think I’m the brave one at this table. I don’t know how you do it.” Melba had been the target of many sad gazes in the past weeks, but Clark’s held a glow of admiration beside the compassion. Pity was comforting, but admiration—his admiration—felt like it relit the fuel of her determination. “I’d be begging God to get me out of that every hour if I were in your shoes. I’m not wired for that sort of thing, but you? You manage it, even when it seems impossible. If I had one of those plastic hero badges we give out to the second graders I’d pin twelve of them on you this minute.” He blinked, then ran his hands down his face. “I think that was the goofiest thing I’ve ever said to anyone.”
It was goofy, but it touched a part of her that had been squeezed tight for weeks. The resulting laugh felt welcome and filled with grace. “No, it’s sweet.” When he raised a red eyebrow from behind his hands, she added, “In a weird, off-beat kind of way.” Melba took a deep breath, feeling the tension slough off her shoulders. “Thanks.”
Clark leaned on one elbow. “For complimenting you with twelve plastic badges?”
“For this.” Then, to her surprise, she added, “For dragging me out of the house.” She shook her head, remembering the chaos of the afternoon. “For dragging Dad out of the water.”
“Hero tendencies. I like to save people. I just prefer to do it on dry land or I’d have joined the Coast Guard.”
“Well, you did just buy a very pretty boat.”
“Noticed those fine lines, did you? I ought to turn myself in for highway robbery. Max Jones sold it to me for a song.”
He looked at Melba for a long second, his eyes slanted in decision. “I’d take you back out on her, but...” His eyes squinted shut for a moment. “Well, I’m not so sure that would be a smart thing to do.”
No, that wasn’t at all a smart thing to do. “No, thanks, I’ve already gotten wet.”
“And I’ve already proven my weakness for...shall we say ‘distractions.’” His eyes dropped to the checked tablecloth, his fingers nervously outlining the red squares. “Truth is, I made myself a promise when I came here, and I’ve already shown myself up for how bad I’ll be at keeping it. I don’t have the best track record for keeping my mind on my job. I just bought a boat named ‘Escape Clause,’ if you need an example.” He looked up for a second, but couldn’t hold her gaze in the same intense way he had a while ago. “I think that’s one of the things God is trying to teach me in coming here. I need to put all my energy into being chief. Pop’s put a lot of faith in me, and I need to earn it.”
At any other time in her life, Melba would have been hurt, or at least annoyed at his unspoken “we can’t take this any further,” but his honesty—and her relief—wouldn’t let her. He was admitting he felt that thing, that indefinable tug she’d been feeling since he touched her on the riverbank. He knew what she knew; that this was no time to pursue whatever it was dangling in front of them. Not for either of them. “We both have big jobs to do at the moment.”
“My ten tons haven’t fallen around my ankles yet, but they could.” Now he could hold her gaze again. “Becoming fire chief means a lot to me. I need to make it work, Melba. For a whole bunch of reasons.” The charmer’s smile curled up one corner of his mouth. “It’s not that I...”
“But...” She didn’t let him finish. Clark didn’t have anything other than simple friendship to offer her at the moment. And that was best, because neither did she.
Her heart was in tatters for more reasons than just Dad’s illness. Her father’s secret had just pulled the rug out from underneath everything she knew about love, marriage and family. She’d been so sure Mom and Dad loved each other, but did they really? If her parents were capable of deception and infidelity, what hope did anyone have for a true marriage? The two people Melba trusted most in the world had been keeping huge secrets from her for her whole life. It made her wonder if she’d ever trust anyone again.
No, Melba found herself glad Clark was shutting the door on anything romantic right now. He didn’t have the time for it and she...she just didn’t have the heart for it. Not now.
Chapter Seven
He should feel better.
Clark had just kept a promise to himself not to let romantic distractions get in the way, even though large parts of him wanted to end that evening in something more than friendship. Melba Wingate was a distraction package wrapped in temptation and tied up with allure. She was completely different from women who usually caught his attention, which made the whole thing even more confounding.
Shaking his head, Clark tried to put her enormous brown eyes out of his mind as he slid his key into the fire station office door...only to find it open. Great. That could only mean one thing. He ducked his head back out the door to eye the station
’s kitchen window. The bright lights confirmed what he already knew, and the satisfying meal in his stomach turned to stone. For a brief moment, he considered forgetting the files he needed for tomorrow’s early morning meeting, but it wasn’t any use. Pop would come find him sooner or later. He gritted his teeth as he flipped on the office lights. A bolt of defiance kept him from walking into the kitchen where he knew Pop was waiting. Let him come to me if he wants to get into this.
Sure enough, not five minutes later he heard footsteps and looked up from his files to see his father looming cross-armed in the doorway. “You bought Max Jones’s boat.”
Some days the small-town gossip was more dangerous than half of Detroit’s crime syndicates. “I did.”
Pop didn’t elaborate on his opinion of the purchase, but then he didn’t have to—his scowl spoke for him. Clark took a breath to defend the perfectly reasonable desire to own a boat when one lived on a river, but his father cut him off.
“A boat you didn’t even own yet before you made a scene on the riverbank with Mort Wingate.” He said it with the tone a father would use to scold a young boy for letting a baseball go through the neighbor’s window.
Clark felt the itch of a fight climb up his spine. “That was none of my doing.”
“Because it’s nothing like you to open up the motor of your brand-new toy and speed without thinking of the consequences. Churn up enough wake to get an old man wet while he sat on the riverbank.”
It was so far from the truth of what happened that Clark didn’t know where to start. He stood up, leveraging the six inches he had over his father as a grown man. “Are you even going to bother asking me what really happened?”
The Fireman's Homecoming Page 6
