The Fireman's Homecoming

by Allie Pleiter

  “It’s real.” Her fingers buried themselves in her hair, as if she could hold the storm of worry in with her hands. “It’s right here. I think I was pretending it wasn’t, that it was just Dad losing it, but...” She swiped a tear away with the back of her hand. “It’s true. He’s not my father.”

  Clark didn’t want to leave her like this, but he also knew he had to get out of there. He had to find some way to make an escape before Melba asked...

  “And who on earth is this G?”

  Aw, come on, Lord, was that really necessary? Clark felt as trapped at the bottom of a dark hole as clearly as he had that night at the fire.

  “I mean, where did he come from? Mom and Dad were married and he’s in there messing with everything and telling her things like ‘I’ve always loved you.’” Melba’s voice began to pitch higher with anger. Who wouldn’t be angry? The woman’s life had been turned inside out within the space of a month.

  He didn’t have to, but he asked anyway, “Can I see the letter?” As she handed him the envelope, he instinctively handed her a tissue from his pocket.... Chief Bradens insisted every firefighter carry tissues or handkerchiefs in their uniform as a gesture of decency because they so often came upon people in tears. He’d never been able to leave the house without tucking one in his pants pocket. Melba had used four of his since they’d met.

  Clark stood up, pretending to need more light to see the letter. The shack was feeling close and tight, the air suddenly holding too much dust. He heard Melba sniffle behind him, and he turned for a second—truly, his glance had a “last look” feel to it—and watched her dab her eyes. They’d be linked—or maybe they’d be separated—by what he said next. Actually, Clark realized they were already linked in some way, and they’d go on being linked whether he spoke what he saw or not. But inevitably this would place a barrier between them as well.

  The scan of the letter wasn’t really necessary. More of a stalling tactic, if Clark was honest with himself. He’d recognized already, had gotten a short glimpse of the single-letter signature. There wasn’t any use in trying to deny it: no one made Gs the way his father did. It was a younger, stronger version, but inarguably his father’s. Pop was “G.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  For a moment, Clark tried to tell himself he wasn’t really sure. He could couch it like a hunch, give both of them a measure of false hope, stall the dangerous news the way he’d been taught to do with victims in crisis. Still, could he even pretend to deny why God had orchestrated his presence here at this particular moment? Did he have any right to withhold the truth when she seemed so besieged by missing information? He stared for a second, unable to decide if it was more cruel to tell her or to withhold the facts.

  “Why do there have to be so many secrets?” Melba sighed behind him. “What’s the point?”

  “I don’t know, Melba.” It was a half-truth. He really didn’t understand the point of the mountain of lies piling up in front of him. Clark refolded the letter, the “I will always love you” cruelly showing up as the last thing he saw before tucking it back in the envelope. He sat down and took Melba’s hand, laying the letter in her upturned palm. “But, I suppose you know for sure now, instead of all that guessing. I suppose that’s something.”

  Her face pinched in anger. He couldn’t blame her. Parts of him were boiling up even as they spoke, and he was going to need to get out of there soon. “Something? It’s something, all right. All these years, and four people knew the truth about me, but not one of them ever let me know.” She looked up at him, her eyes wild and wide. “And maybe it’s more than just four. Maybe loads of people know, and they’ve been whispering behind my back all these years.”

  “I can’t think that’s true.” It couldn’t be. Pop wouldn’t stand for it. He’d promised Melba’s mother that he wouldn’t let word spread. Of course, he’d also promised Clark’s own mother to love, honor and protect her for as long as they lived, and yet here he was, just a few years after his own marriage, offering to run away with another woman. Clark bit down on the argument erupting inside of him. “Your parents loved you.”

  “You don’t lie to people you love. I don’t lie to people I love.”

  She chose the worst possible words, for while Clark realized he was falling for Melba, he wouldn’t tell her what he suspected. Not now. And who was he kidding? He “suspected” nothing. He knew. She’d probably never forgive his silence right now, but he couldn’t speak up. He just couldn’t make the words come out from under all that anger.

  She shot up off the bench, shaking her head. “Whoa there.” He lunged after her, catching her elbow. “Hang on a minute.”

  She pulled from his grasp, wheeling on him. “Hang on a minute? For what?”

  “You’ve had a shock. You need time to think this through.”

  “Dad knew!” She spat the words out. “They both knew. All those years, even when I was old enough to handle stuff like this. This was the eighties, for crying out loud, not the Victorian age.”

  “Melba.” Clark grabbed her hand and tried to hold her wildly shifting gaze with his eyes. “We don’t know anything for sure.”

  “We?” she snarled.

  That slip told him he was in trouble here. “Okay, poor choice of words. This is happening to you, I get that.” Despite his words, he couldn’t let on how his own world had just tilted. It was no fun to learn your father held a lifelong torch for someone who wasn’t your mother. He let go of Melba’s arm to run a hand down his own face. “Just don’t haul off without thinking.” Thinking? Thoughts were exploding in Clark’s brain like shrapnel. Pop had been married to Mom when he wrote that. Pop had been ready to leave Mom—and him, Clark realized with a start, remembering the date on the letter—for Maria when he wrote that. None of that matched up with the man Clark called father, and suddenly everything looked like lies. “I think you need to take a minute before...”

  “Before what? I make it worse?” She flung her arms wide, curls falling into her angry face. “Explain to me, Clark, just how this could get worse?”

  Clark knew exactly how this could get worse. Lord, please, show me I’m wrong. He wasn’t. The column of ice running down his back told him he wasn’t, that he’d have to tell her what he knew and live with the consequences. Only not now. Not when he was still reeling himself.

  “I’m showing this to Dad. I’m done with all the lies.”

  “Melba, don’t do that. Give yourself a minute to think. To pray, even.” Oh, that was a low blow, Clark chided himself. How dare you bring God into this as if you’re the righteous one when you’re standing here withholding what you know.

  “I don’t need a minute.” She headed back toward the house.

  Tell her. It will only get worse, his conscience hollered at him. “Melba, stop.” He lunged after her again, and the pain in her eyes when she turned cut his heart to ribbons. The urge to tell her the truth was almost choking him, but he couldn’t manage to form the words. Instead, he tried to stall. “C’mon, Melba, just hang on a minute. Think about your Dad. You can’t just slam into him with this—he’s not up to it or he’d have told you earlier.”

  “Not up to it? I don’t care whether or not he’s up to it. I haven’t been up to any of this and no one’s asked me if I was ready!”

  “I know.” He couldn’t add to her pain right now. Cowardly or not, he couldn’t hand her a reason to turn from him. Instead, he pulled her to him, and she crumpled into his arms. It should have been wonderful to have her cling to him like that, but it felt terrible.

  “I was lied to.” She cried into his shoulder. “By the people who are supposed to love me most. You know what it sounds like to me? Like this ‘G’ person sent my biological father away. Swept him under the rug like a...a...like I was some kind of ugly mistake that would mess up everybody’s plans. Do you have any idea what that
feels like?”

  Clark felt the anger and betrayal unwinding his composure. The guy who messed up everybody’s plans, who did what he wanted and never stopped to consider the consequences? Oh, Clark had loads of experience with what that felt like. He’d heard it nearly every day of high school: “Chief Bradens’s son should never act like this.” Act like what? Like the disloyal schemer who wrote that letter? All those respectability proclamations rang so false right now that his gut was roiling from the dissonance. “Your dad’s not even home right now, remember? It’s going to take some thought on how to talk to Mort about this.”

  “‘Mort.’” She pulled out of his embrace, her hands twisting through her hair again. “Do I call him Dad? It’s like I don’t know what to do about anything or what’s even real.”

  “He’s still your father.”

  “Easy for you to say.” She was mad at the whole world right now, and he couldn’t blame her.

  Still, this couldn’t have come as a complete shock—she’d already suspected as much before seeing the letter. Clark fisted his hands in frustration, trying to remind himself she didn’t know what he knew. “I think,” he said as calmly as he could manage, “you shouldn’t talk to your father...”

  “Which one?” she cut in.

  “Mort. I think you shouldn’t talk to Mort just yet.” It was getting harder to stay calm, and he had selfish reasons to not let her confront her father until he knew more. “Has it occurred to you that Mort might not know about what went on between this ‘G’ person and your mom? Do you really want to hand that to him now? Do you want your last months with him to be about this?” The more Clark thought about this, the worse Pop was starting to look. The roiling in his stomach was solidifying into a tight ball of disgust. All the speeches about conduct and honor. All the lectures about family name. What a pack of lies.

  Melba put one foot on her front steps. He could see white knuckles on her hands as they clung to the railing. It was the same stance of weary pain he’d seen when he’d found her with her head against the vending machine. He knew she was trying to do the right thing but it must have felt to her like God was just heaping pain upon pain. Where was the mercy in that?

  “I’d like to be alone.”

  She looked like a woman ready to do something drastic. Something hugely regrettable. “Promise me you won’t go to your father until I talk you through this again.”

  “Why should I promise you anything?”

  Clark threw his hands up in the air, annoyed because she was right. “Because I’m trying to help.” Help? How did keeping the truth from her help?

  She turned to him then, her eyes dark and angry. “Thanks for your help, Clark, but I think you should leave.”

  “Melba...”

  The door shut in his face. A man of honor would have pushed open the door and told her what he knew, explained why he needed her to wait.

  Yes, well, we’ve all learned just what kind of men of honor Bradens men are, haven’t we? Clark swallowed the urge to punch something, someone, and stomped back to his car.

  * * *

  Clark slumped on the front steps of Pop’s house an hour later, sweaty and out of breath. In a desperate scramble for control, he’d gone on a five-mile run—the first mile at a full-tilt angry sprint, no less—to clear his head before he saw his father. It hadn’t worked. He was still angry—fuming, actually—but the physical boiling in his gut had died down enough to allow the slim hope of a productive conversation.

  Hold me back, Lord, Clark prayed. He’d tried to lay the whole situation out before God as he ran. That was the way he wrestled with things now, to pray it out piece by piece as he ran, but it failed him this time. Clark never got any further than “hold me back,” fully aware of the way that the wave of built-up anger, the years of judgment, the glares of disappointment all pressed hard against his control. I have to try to get this untangled. There’s no hope of my doing that without Your grace right now. Taking one more deep breath and wiping his forehead with the hem of his T-shirt, Clark knocked on Pop’s door.

  The frown on his father’s face when he pulled open the door to see Clark—red in the face and dripping sweat—didn’t help matters. “Your shower broken?” It was only half a joke.

  “I need to talk to you. Alone.” It was near dinnertime, and Pop often had buddies over for dinner. The smell of barbecue chicken wafted out of the doorway.

  “Nobody here but us chickens,” Pop chuckled.

  Clark didn’t laugh as he walked in behind his dad. He headed straight for the kitchen, wanting to put a counter or a table between him and Pop for this conversation.

  “Sounds serious.” Pop lifted the lid on a saucepan, stirred something, then replaced the lid. “Sit down.”

  “I’d rather stand.”

  That got the chief’s attention. Pop lowered one eyebrow and eyed Clark carefully as he eased himself into his favorite chair at the end of the table. Clark’s mind flashed reluctantly back to family dinners around the table, only now while the details were all postcard-perfect, everything felt hollow, shellacked to be shiny where it wasn’t.

  No sense beating around the bush. “What happened between you and Maria Wingate?”

  Pop narrowed his eyes. “What kind of a question is that?”

  “Melba found a letter as she was cleaning out the shack at Mort’s place today. It’s got your signature on it, and it’s pretty clear there was something—a lot of somethings—going on.” Clark held his father’s eyes. “Can you please not snowball me on this? Will you give me that much?” He wanted to yell, to stand over his father and threaten all kinds of things, but had promised himself the decency of asking for Pop’s voluntary cooperation.

  Pop sat still for a long moment, then let out a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. He cursed under his breath, something Clark had never heard his father do. “I suppose,” Pop said in a tight, quiet voice, “I was an idiot for thinking it would never surface one day. To Melba, that is.” His gaze flicked up to Clark. “But you? I didn’t see that coming.”

  Clark felt the choking press of “it’s real” he’d seen come over Melba, a knot of sour confirmation cutting off his breath. “I know I didn’t,” he said, not caring how sharp he cut the edges of his words.

  “I never figured Maria would keep that letter. She should have burned it. She was never smart about those kinds of things, impulsive and emotional.” Despite the censure in his words his tone was warm, fond.

  It made Clark nuts to hear his father talking about someone else’s wife like that. He paced the room, trying to keep a lid on his anger. “I saw the date. You were married to Mom when you wrote that. You were my father when you wrote that! How could you even live with yourself, lying to Mom?”

  “She knew.”

  Clark planted his hands on the table, leaning in to glare into his father’s eyes. “What?”

  “Well, not about Danny Baker—no one was ever supposed to know about that. But she knew how I felt about Maria when she asked me to marry her.”

  Clark’s knees gave way beneath him and he sunk into a chair. Mom always told of Pop’s proposal down on one knee on the bridge by the river at sunset—the kind of gooey, fairy-tale details that used to make him groan in middle school. “But...”

  Pop waved his hand as if the facts were inconsequential. “I told her she could make up whatever story she liked. Folks would never sit well with her asking me back then. Her father’s drinking was out of control and she was desperate to get out of the house—and she loved me. I did love her...in time. And she loved you so much. You were born two days after her father died. ‘My new life,’ she called you. Always said you were what saved her. It was never really me.”

  Clark felt like he’d been hurled off a cliff, still tumbling in the air. “So it would’ve been just fine for you to walk away if Ma
ria Wingate would have you?” His father’s calm—so calm it was bordering on relief—was infuriating. “How is this okay? How is any of this okay?” He jabbed a finger at Pop. “How could you stand there and lecture me on honor and family name knowing you’d done this?”

  “I know what you must think of me...”

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Clark shot up off the table to pace the kitchen. “You don’t want to know what I think of you right now.”

  “I was never unfaithful to your mother after that.” Pop’s voice rose but Clark wouldn’t even give him the satisfaction of turning around. “Mort agreed to raise the baby as his own and Maria chose to stay with Mort, so that was the end of it. Your mother and I found a way to build a life—not a perfect life but good enough. You were loved, even when you made a mess of things.”

  It all made a sick sort of sense now. The obsessive dedication to the firehouse. Why his mother put up with it all those years. The frost between Pop and any of the Wingates. Clark felt like someone had taken a knife to all his childhood memories and slashed a gaping hole in the canvas. “Yes, I was such a disappointment to a fine upstanding man like you. How could you lecture me about Lyla?”

  “Because Lyla was married!”

  Lyla had been one of the low points of Clark’s rebellious youth. He’d been flat-out in love with her when she’d admitted to him she was married, that she was leaving her husband. That whole month was a storm of sin and pain and flying in the face of everything Clark knew was right. “Yeah, well, we all see where I get it from, don’t we?”