by Lila Ashe
Mira gave a long-suffering sigh. “Must you, darling?”
Lexie nodded. “Yep.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Over the main course, Mira quizzed James on his the state of his car. “I saw you, you know.”
James made a noncommittal noise.
“Driving on Fourth. You were going too fast.”
“Mmmm.”
Lexie focused on her duck, which was rich and complex. Her mother had given her a tiny portion, but that was all right—Lexie wouldn’t hesitate to help herself to more.
“I want to know when you last washed it.”
“A week ago.”
“James Tindall. Do not lie to your mother.”
“If I tell you the truth, you’ll have a cow.”
“I don’t have cows.”
Lexie allowed herself a small smile at her mother’s distress. Mira did have cows. All over the place, as often as possible. She practically mooed.
James spoke with his mouth full, something designed to make Mira lose it even faster. “I washed it in January.”
“But it’s October.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“You can’t do that.”
“What? Keep up with the calendar? We’ve been using the Gregorian calendar since the switch from the Julian, in 1592, and even though it’s inaccurate, it works for modern civilization, so …”
“It’s embarrassing. I can’t have a son driving a car that looks as if you sell drugs from it.”
“Whoa, now,” said James, who had admitted to Lexie once he’d never even tried pot in his teens. “Did you actually see me selling heroin down by the docks or did someone just tell you I was there? Because that’s a lie. I sell over by the bookstore.”
Mira’s eyes went to slits. “That’s not nice. Just wash your car. Your father would have a fit.”
“Dad wouldn’t have cared,” mumbled James.
“He cared about everything,” insisted Mira, pushing her plate away with a petulant, delicate shove. “Now I’ve lost my appetite.” She glared at Lexie.
Lexie, ignoring her mother, buttered another piece of bread.
“Darling, I bought that for James.”
“You bought a whole loaf of herbed slab from Josie’s bakery not intending for me to have even one piece?” Lexie grabbed another slice before her mother could move the plate away.
And in this way, as always, they entered the Lexie portion of the evening.
Lexie could stage it, if it were a play. She could write out the words and block the action. She knew her mother would say things like “a little chubby, don’t you think?” and “no boy wants a girl to weigh more than he does.” Lexie knew she would respond with curt assents or dissents that Mira would pretend she hadn’t heard. The best part of the night would be when Mira stood, putting her hands flat against her belly. “Do you see this? Do you know how hard I work on this?” Lexie would barely prevent herself from snorting, thinking about the two tummy tucks her already-thin mother had gone through and the fact that food had always sickened Mira, no matter how much she liked to cook.
Mira spent all her time worried about how she looked in the mirror. Lexie had spent years working on herself, on accepting her body as it was. As it looked good. As it wanted to be.
And an hour in her mother’s house could put her right back to high-school-level mortification.
Skipping this awful part of Friday night dinner was almost impossible, unless one had a grenade.
She did.
“I’m going on a date.”
Mira choked on her sip of wine. “Darling! You’re kidding. Really?”
“Well played,” James said in an admiring voice.
“Oh, Lexie. I can’t believe it.” Mira pressed a shaky hand to her flat bosom. “Really? And I didn’t even set this one up for you! Are you serious?”
It was going to be almost as bad as the weight conversation would have been, but at least it had novelty going for it. “I’m not just making it up, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Oh, no. Of course not. Who is it?”
Crap. Lexie hadn’t thought this all the way through. “Just a guy. You don’t know him.” Lexie didn’t know him either. Coin was picking him. He had said he would come in to dispatch the following night and they’d vet each other’s online suggestions.
“Not someone you work with, is it? Tell me that’s not true.”
Lexie bristled. “I’m not stupid. It’s not. Completely not. He’s in … analysis. Computer. Graphics. Something.”
“What a relief.” Mira arched an eyebrow at James, as if he would back her up on this one. “I never want you to lose a man the way I lost your father. No men in the line of fire.”
Just out of Mira’s line of sight, James mimed cutting his wrists with his butter knife.
“Moving on,” Mira said. “Tell me about this boy.”
“Man.”
“Man, then. Who is he? What does he look like?”
How did she describe someone as yet imaginary? Lexie reached for another piece of bread, ignoring her mother’s wilting gaze. Worse, what if she was deluding herself? She hadn’t done online dating in a while—what if she’d run out of Darling Bay men to date? What if there was no one else out there, and she ended up paying for Coin to go to Bora Bora with a tiny blonde? “He’s medium.”
“What does that mean? Is he tall?”
Make something up. Anything. “Not really. Average. Well, pretty tall, I guess.”
Mira leaned forward. “More. What color hair?”
“Black. Kind of wavy.”
“What else?”
What would it have been like, if her mother had always been this interested in her? Like a girlfriend, like someone she could talk to? “Dark brown. His nose is slightly crooked, but it fits his face. Huge biceps. He’s quiet, but he’s funny. Kind of hysterical, actually. He makes me laugh, but I think a lot of people don’t really get him.” A flash of heat raced through her body as she realized she was describing Coin. She hadn’t meant to do that.
“How many times have you seen each other?”
A hundred thousand. “None. It’s a blind date.”
Mira stilled. “How do you know what he’s like?”
Lexie’s brain scrambled, grabbing ideas and letting them go. She settled for a simple, “It was a very thorough ad.”
“An ad.”
“It’s an online date, Mother. Of course it was an ad.”
“Does that mean …” Mira’s voice trailed off as if she had to gain strength before going on. “Does that mean you placed an ad as well? Like a …”
“Like a what?” Lexie couldn’t even guess where her mother would take it next.
“You know, this fellow in my church group has a son who lives at home. He does something with computers, too. I was going to get his phone number for you. Brett didn’t tell me much, but his son sounded lovely even if he is a bit of a loner.”
Lexie bit into another piece of bread, barely even tasting it anymore. She stared at her mother without responding.
Mira pointed to the butter knife in Lexie’s hand. “Now you’re just trying to upset me.”
Lexie rolled her eyes. Carefully, she put her knife back onto her plate with a clink, and then she set down the half-eaten piece of bread. “Well, you’re easy to upset. I apologize for ruffling your feathers.”
“It’s just that I want you to be healthy …”
“I am healthy. I run. My cholesterol is jaw-droppingly great. I told you that.” No, no, no, she didn’t want to go down this road. Not again. She couldn’t take it tonight. “And the guy I’m going out with likes a girl of normal weight.”
“But …”
“I’m normal, Mother, whether you like that or not. Average is size 12 to 14 now.”
Mira gasped.
Lexie met the gasp with a sigh.
James burped and reached for the bottle of wine. “Fill ‘er up.”
“At least have
a salad when you go out with him. Just a salad.”
Lexie’s head dropped forward. When she lifted it again, she said, “Fine.”
Her mother had won. Her mother always won.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“This one.” Coin pointed at a woman who looked as if she painted her teeth with Wite-Out.
“No way. What if she bit you?”
“Okay, click that one. I like brunettes.”
Lexie peered at the screen. “Is one of her eyes drooping?”
“Are you going to kick them all out of my empty imaginary bed without even letting me read their profiles?”
Lexie took a moment to wonder what that bed might look like. “You make your bed every day, don’t you?”
Coin, his elbow on the table next to her laptop, said, “Yeah. Doesn’t everyone?”
Lexie made her bed once a week when she changed her sheets, whether she wanted to or not. “Sure. What about her?” She indicated a woman perhaps a little higher on the age spectrum Coin had stipulated.
“She looks good. If I wanted the Early Bird Special and to save money on her movie tickets.”
“Don’t be mean,” Lexie said, but she couldn’t keep the laughter out of her voice. Looking at people online had always been interesting, but it had always held a strange intensity, also. It wasn’t like meeting someone in the grocery store or at church. You didn’t get to interact with them a few times before considering having a private meal together. You had to look, read, and then project your entire life—marriage, babies, death—based on what his favorite band was. She could tell Coin was quickly learning that. He’d found a woman he liked the look of, and he’d been excited when she liked Beck. “I like Beck!” he’d said. Then he’d gone on to read that the woman worshipped Beck, and went to every single one of his concerts, and her number one goal in life was to get her hands on a backstage pass, and then to get her hands on Beck’s personal backstage. Coin had tilted his mouth to the side. “That’s not good, is it?”
“No,” Lexie had said gently. “Click the next one.”
An hour later, Coin had the hang of it. He’d even reached the point of explaining it to her. Lexie leaned back in her seat to enjoy it.
“Look,” he said. “I get it. You go to their profile, and you decide if there could be something there, based on surface impressions.”
“Based purely on shallowness, yes. Why don’t you mansplain it to me some more?” She was teasing him. Of course looks were the first thing a person noticed. She found herself looking at the back of Coin’s neck, where his tee shift lay along his shoulder. A cord of muscle ran out of his short sleeve. His hands were sure on the computer now, pointing and clicking.
“Hey, have you been working out?” she asked.
It was an honest question—it looked like he had—but he laughed her off. “Okay, I get it. I’m shallow. But you have to have chemistry, right?” Click, click, click. “There are a few cute girls on here, but I have to say, a lot of them are just kind of …” He paused, and clicked a few more. “Not.”
Lexie inhaled sharply. Her own profile was on the screen in front of him. They hadn’t talked about it yet—she hadn’t shown it to him.
He clicked past the picture of Lexie and to the next one, a pretty brunette with a short bob and red lipstick. “I guess this one’s not bad.”
Lexie waited for him to laugh. Then she would punch him in the shoulder for being stupid, and they’d get on with their browsing.
“Nah,” he said. “She’s a vegan. Good for her, but I need my bacon on Saturday mornings.” He clicked past three more.
He didn’t say a word about flying past her own picture.
While he was talking about the Nots.
Lexie’s stomach hurt, twisting into an acidic knot. The back of her throat tightened. He wasn’t joking. He wasn’t playing a prank on her. He’d looked at Lexie’s picture, and he hadn’t recognized her. He’d thrown her right to the bottom of the pile with the other girls who weren’t pretty enough.
911 rang.
Lexie lunged for the button, grateful for the ringer’s blare. So grateful she didn’t have to speak to Coin. Because if she’d had to, her voice would have wobbled, she knew it.
As it was, her clear, strong voice said, “911, what’s the address of the emergency? Okay, tell me exactly what happened.”
CHAPTER NINE
Lexie had gone weird there, at the end. Right when 911 had rung. Usually if firefighters were in dispatch and they ended up being the ones assigned to the call, she’d shoo them on their way even before she dispatched them to it, smiling as the waved them out the door.
But she’d gone all mechanical. Answering the call—a man choking on a meatball—and dispatching Coin’s engine without meeting his eyes. Sure, she was also giving the wife medical instructions at the same time she was banging out the engine and the rescue, but Lexie could usually do both those things while waving and taking a sip of coffee. Maybe she knew them or something. They were just around the corner from Lexie’s house, after all. Maybe they were favorite neighbors. That must have been it.
By the time Engine One got on scene, Lexie had talked the wife through the Heimlich, and the meatball had been expelled. Even though he was fine, Rescue One still transported the patient to the hospital, because he asked to go. In a British accent, the old man had pointed to his throat and said, “It’s still in there. ‘Ospickle. I want to go to the ‘ospickle to make sure she did me right. Maybe she kil’t me.”
The wife had folded her arms across her broad chest and said, “I saved your bloody life, man. I did you more right than I done in years. You should thank the men, you ingrate.”
Coin’s favorite part of the job was the interaction with patients. This wasn’t true of all his coworkers. It used to be that men—and back then, it was all men—wanted to be firemen because they wanted to fight fires. The fire service had attracted a certain kind of man with a specified skill set.
Times had changed. Instead of taking care of loved ones at home, people today relied on the fire service for medical care. People called 911 for things like migraines and turned ankles because they didn’t really know what else to do. And over the same few decades, buildings had become safer. Every new house and business in Darling Bay had to have sprinklers installed. Its attic might burn, but the house itself would be saved. True, they did have their fair share of older buildings with poor wiring, and there would always be the idiots who used cheap extension cords, but nowadays the fire service was primarily a medical organization. More than eighty percent of their calls were medicals now, and the older firefighters who hated that fact were reaching retirement age. The new, young guys, the eager-beaver twenty-one-year olds, were coming in with their paramedic licenses in hand, knowing how to start IV lines better and faster than the guys who had thirty years on the line.
Medicals were what Coin loved, the face to face, the way he could make people’s days better. No one called the fire department because they were having a good time. Everyone needed help at some point. Most people—and this still surprised him—apologized for calling, for interrupting the firefighters’ routine. “I’m so sorry you had to come out. You have better things to do.” They didn’t realize that this was what they did. What they’d signed up for.
“It’s no problem, ma’am.” He gave a small nod of his head to the patient’s wife. For a quick second he felt like doffing his invisible cap at her, and then realized it must be because of her British accent.
Back in the engine, Tox said, “Pizza? I don’t want to eat Luke’s chicken. Did you see how much red pepper he put on that?”
Coin took the right turn instead of the left that would bring them down to the wharf and Junior’s Pizzeria. “I gotta get back to the station.”
“Why?” Hank asked from the back. As usual, his headset crackled. He was the most junior so he had to use the worst headset in the rig.
“I got a couple of things to do.” Coin had to figure out
what had been wrong with Lexie when he left. Had he screwed something up? She was the one who wanted him to go online, right? This whole dating thing had been all her idea, after all. Had he insulted one of her friends or something?
When it came to Lexie, he didn’t want to screw up one single thing. She was too … something. Coin didn’t want to name what it was. Come to think of it, he couldn’t.
Tox sighed heavily into the mike. “You have to get back to dispatch.”
Coin hit the brakes at the light too hard.
Tox said, “Geez, man, chill. What’s wrong with you? What was Lexie saying to you back there?”
“Why?” Coin watched the light carefully, as if it might turn a new color any minute. Purple. Pink.
“You usually come out of dispatch with a smile. And now Lexie is all stink-pants on the radio.”
As if from a mile away Lexie could hear them, her voice came over the radio. “Engine One, status check?” It was her annoyed voice. She didn’t use it often, and because of that, the guys took it seriously.
“Did you hit the available button?” Coin pointed at the computer on the dash.
Tox said, “Crap.”
Hank’s voice crackled over the headset, “Ever since you and Grace got together, dude. You’re off your game.”
Tox twisted in his seat. “You want to say that to my face?”
Coin knew Tox was all bluster. And Hank was right. Ever since Tox fell for Grace, he’d been softened. A couple of his rough edges had been smoothed off. Coin approved. “You gonna answer dispatch or not?”
Tox clicked the radio button. “Engine One clear.” He released the button and spoke into his rig headset, so only Coin and Hank could hear him. “She knows that. She can see where we are on the computer. What I don’t get is when dispatch asks us stupid questions that they already know the answer to, like they’re trying to trip us up. Especially Lexie. She’s not usually a witch like that.”
Coin took the turn onto Lowry Avenue.
Lexie’s voice filled the cab. “Engine One, check for open mike.”
Coin felt a sick chill. “Tox,” he hissed.
“It’s not me.” Tox held his hands up. “I’m not touching anything.”
