April Embers_A Second Chance Single Daddy Firefighter Romance

by Chase Jackson

  Charlie and I had this running tradition, every Wednesday morning we’d wake up early and clamber into the kitchen. I’d pull out all the pots and pans while Charlie scrolled through recipes on her iPad, then she’d make her selection -- usually something ridiculously challenging -- and I’d try my best to execute it.

  It was a tradition that was born around the same time that Charlotte’s mother left. Those were dark days, and I would have done just about anything to make my daughter smile… even if it meant playing Top Chef at 6 A.M.

  Of course it helped that Charlie was easily impressed. Back in those days, mixing a few drops of green food coloring into the scrambled eggs was enough to blow my daughter’s mind. I thought I had some pretty good tricks up my sleeve, I’d add fruit smiley faces to her French toast, or Mickey Mouse ears to her pancakes.

  Then one Wednesday morning I made the mistake of suggesting that Charlie find a recipe on her iPad. One Google search later, and suddenly Daddy’s special pancakes didn’t seem so impressive…

  “I found it!" Charlie declared triumphantly. She hopped down from the kitchen table and brought me her iPad. I glanced down at her selection, and my eyebrows shot up in surprise.

  “You sure that’s what you want, kiddo?”

  “Yep!” Charlie nodded.

  “Alright,” I shrugged. On the inside, I was sighing in relief.

  Charlie had picked a recipe for chocolate chip pancakes. After last week’s crepe catastrophe, I was grateful to work with something simple.

  I turned the heat down on the skillet, then I started hunting for a mixing bowl in the cardboard moving boxes that were stacked in the corner of the kitchen.

  “So how are you liking your new school?” I asked, trying my best to sound casual.

  “It’s ok,” Charlie shrugged her shoulders. She had brought her iPad back to the table, and she was hunched over the screen.

  “Just ok?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  I found a whisk in the box of utensils, and I tucked it in the front pocket of my jeans as I continued to search for a mixing bowl.

  “What do you think about your teacher?” I asked. “Mrs. Root?”

  “She’s nice,” Charlie shrugged again. Then she added, “There are a lot of helpers in our class.”

  “Helpers?” I glanced up from the box.

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, keeping her eyes locked on the iPad. “That’s when someone’s mom comes to help out with the class.”

  “That sounds fun,” I said. “Maybe I could be a helper--”

  “No, Daddy!” Charlie wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “Dads can’t be helpers. Just moms.”

  “Oh,” I said, swallowing heavily. I had a bad feeling about where this might be headed. “I don’t see why I--”

  Charlie’s eyes flicked up from the iPad and she glared across the kitchen at me.

  “Just moms!” she repeated firmly.

  I found a mixing bowl at the bottom of the cardboard box, and I sighed as I lifted it out.

  Maybe I had gotten this whole Wednesday morning breakfast thing all wrong. Maybe instead of elaborate breakfast recipes, I should be scouring Google for tips on being a single dad…

  If it were up to me, Charlotte would never want for anything. Unfortunately, the one thing that she does want is outside of my control…

  “I want Mommy to be a helper,” Charlie said. “Can you ask her for me?”

  Her voice was so innocent; so hopeful… it fucking killed me.

  Haley’s mugshot immediately filled my head, and I turned away from my daughter so she couldn’t see the look of disgust on my face.

  Growing up with my mother and stepfather, I believed that the worst feeling you could have towards somebody was hatred. Haley Scott proved that theory wrong.

  It would have been so much easier to hate Haley -- and believe me, she had given me plenty of reasons to. But… I couldn’t hate her.

  The truth was, I wished that Haley could be the kind of mom that volunteered in our daughter’s second grade classroom. I wished she could be the kind of mom that baked cupcakes for PTA bake sales, or made burnt meatloaf for dinner, or nagged our daughter about wearing a coat, even when it was perfectly sunny and warm outside…

  As much as I wanted to hate Haley, I wanted our daughter to love her more.

  For Charlotte’s sake, I wished that we could be one big happy family.

  I wished that we could have a house in the nice part of town, with a white picket fence and pictures on the walls. I wished that we could send out bullshit family Christmas cards every winter, and plan stupid family vacations to Disney every summer…

  I wished for a lot of things, but I knew that wishing wasn’t going to do us any good. Wishing wasn’t going to make us a family, and it sure as hell wasn’t going fill the empty void in my daughter’s heart.

  I crossed the kitchen and crouched beside my daughter’s chair at the table. Her eyes were glued to the iPad screen, and she didn’t glance up until I brushed away a strand of her dark brown hair.

  She dropped the iPad onto the table, and her giant brown eyes flicked up to me.

  “Listen, Charlie… ” I sighed as I brushed away another loose ringlet. “You know that Mommy loves you, right?”

  Charlotte blinked her glassy eyes, and her face remained completely blank as she stared up at me intently.

  “She does,” I whispered. “Very much.”

  “Then why isn’t she visiting me?” Charlotte asked.

  I sighed again. I must have spent hours trying to write the script for this conversation in my head, but the words never quite came out right. Now I had no choice but to improvise,

  “Sometimes grownups need to take care of themselves, before they can take care of other people.”

  Charlotte’s eyebrows wrinkled into a frown.

  Try again. I glanced down at my hands, trying to figure out how I could make Charlotte understand what I was trying to say. Then I had an idea.

  “Do you remember when you got the chicken pox in kindergarten?” I asked.

  Charlotte immediately cringed at the memory, and she buried her face in her hands.

  “Ugh, don’t remind me!” she groaned dramatically, her voice muffled by her palms.

  I couldn’t help but smile. Charlotte had inherited most of my physical traits -- dark hair, brown eyes, a pale complexion -- but that spitfire personality was one-hundred percent her own. She was one of a kind.

  “Do you remember when you got ‘em?” I asked.

  She nodded her head, but she kept her hands over her face as she mumbled, “Spring break.”

  “That’s right,” I ruffled her hair. “What else do you remember about that spring break?”

  She slid her hands down and blinked up at me over her fingertips.

  “Anything special?” I prompted her.

  Her hands fell to her lap and her face lit up with an enthusiastic smile.

  “Yeah!” she bobbed up in her seat. “It was special because Squeaky was going to come stay with us!”

  Squeaky was a guinea pig that lived in an elaborate plastic castle in my daughter’s kindergarten classroom.

  Charlotte had been infatuated with the rodent from the moment she first laid eyes on him. When the kindergarten teacher asked for a volunteer to take Squeaky home and look after him for the duration of the week-long spring break, my daughter had naturally jumped at the chance.

  I had reluctantly agreed to the plan, and we were all set to bring Squeaky home…

  “But then I got sick,” Charlotte grumbled. She scowled darkly and crossed her arms over her chest.

  Two days before the start of spring break, Charlotte woke up with a patch of itchy red blisters on her arm. Within hours, the patch had grown into a full-blown rash, and the school nurse made an official diagnosis, chicken pox.

  The kindergarten teacher didn’t want to send Squeaky home with a sick kid, so the rodent got reassigned to
another student.

  Charlotte had been devastated. And judging by the look on her face now, she still hadn’t given up on holding a grudge…

  “That wasn’t fair!” she grumbled. “Squeaky was supposed to come home with us!”

  “You couldn’t take care of him, Charlie…”

  “I could have!”

  “You were really sick,” I reminded her. “You spent all of spring break in bed with a fever.”

  She scowled up at me, then mumbled, “But I loved Squeaky…”

  “I know you loved Squeaky,” I told her. “But you couldn’t take care of him. You had to take care of yourself, first.”

  Her frown loosened, and I could tell that she finally understood what I was trying to say. Then her eyes widened with concern,

  “Does Mommy have chicken pox? Is that why she can’t take care of me?”

  “No, Mommy doesn’t have chicken pox…”

  “But she’s sick?” Charlie asked.

  I hesitated, then I nodded slowly.

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “But… she’s going to get better, right?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “But I want you to know that she loves you, no matter what.”

  I wasn’t sure that I believed those words myself, I sure as hell hoped that Charlie could.

  I planted a kiss on her forehead, then I grinned,

  “Come on, kiddo. We better get to work on these chocolate chip pancakes, otherwise you’ll be late for school!”

  ***

  One cup of mini chocolate chips, two sticky breakfast plates, and forty-five minutes later, we were pulling into the parking lot of Hartford Elementary.

  We were definitely late for school.

  The parking lot was empty and calm, which meant we had just missed the morning shitshow known as the ‘carpool lane.’

  If we had rolled up fifteen minutes earlier, the parking lot would have been gridlocked with minivans and SUVs, all waiting impatiently for their turn to pull up to the curbside drop-off zone and unleash their spawn.

  But the morning rush had already come and gone, and there was no competition for the coveted curbside spot.

  I had already decided to bypass the maze of orange traffic cones and pull straight up to the curb, when I was suddenly intercepted by a traffic guard in a bright orange vest.

  He jumped in front of my bumper and I slammed on the brakes. The car immediately skidded to a stop, but the traffic guard still felt compelled to blow his whistle at me.

  I had assumed that he was just reprimanding me for cutting across the empty carpool lane, but as his eyes glared at me through the windshield, I realized that he had already started sizing me up.

  My matte black Dodge Challenger Hellcat wasn’t exactly a ‘dad car,’ and I didn’t exactly look like the kinda guy that you’d find hanging out in an elementary school parking lot.

  I already knew what came next…

  The traffic guard stomped around to the side of my car, then tapped his knuckles on the driver side window. I sighed and rolled the window down an inch.

  “Is there a problem, officer?” I asked with a sardonic snarl.

  “You tell me,” he snapped back, peering into my car through the cracked window. “What is your business here?”

  There were a lot of ways that I would have liked to answer that question, but my daughter was in the backseat and I didn’t want her to see Prince Charming turn into the Big Bad Wolf. So instead, I slid off my sunglasses and glared up at the traffic guard.

  “I’m dropping off my daughter,” I said.

  On cue, Charlotte unbuckled herself from her booster seat in the back row and climbed over the center console. Her head popped up over my shoulder.

  The traffic guard looked disappointed, but he backed away from the car and waved me towards the curbside.

  Charlotte kissed me on the cheek, then she flung her Hello Kitty backpack over her shoulder and skipped towards the school.

  I waited until she had disappeared through the doors, then I flicked my eyes back to the traffic guard.

  I tightened my grip on the black leather steering wheel and revved the Hellcat’s Hemi V8 engine.

  The traffic guard glared at me from across the parking lot, then he raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth.

  “I’ll give you something to talk about…”

  I shoved the drive stick into gear, then I dug my foot down on the gas and unleashed the full fury of the Hellcat’s 707 horsepower engine.

  The car tore across the parking lot in the span of a split second, leaving the traffic guard in a cloud of black tire smoke.

  Adrenaline was coursing through my veins like electric current, and my heart was pounding into my ribcage like a fucking jackhammer. The only sound I could hear was the rumble of the Hellcat’s Hemi ringing in my ears as I weaved through downtown Hartford.

  When I saw the red brick firehouse, I eased up on the gas and let the car coast into the gravel parking lot.

  As soon as I cut off the engine, I heard it, the sound of the fire alarm.

  CHAPTER EIGHT | DESIREE

  “Ray Bradbury. Ayn Rand. Anthony Burgess. George Orwell. Aldous Huxley….”

  I recited each of the names out loud as I spelled them out on the whiteboard. When I had finished my list, I capped my Dry Erase marker and turned to face the classroom.

  “Can anybody tell me what these authors all have in common?”

  Silence.

  “Nobody?”

  My eyes darted around the room, surveying the students in my first period AP English class. They were all wearing the same bored expression, and none of them made a peep.

  “Ok. Maybe this will help…”

  I turned back to the list of authors on the whiteboard, then I uncapped my marker and raised it towards the first name on the list,

  “Ray Bradbury wrote ‘Fahrenheit 451,’” I said, scribbling the book title next to the author’s name. “And Ayn Rand wrote ‘Atlas Shrugged’...”

  I worked my way down the list, until I had scribbled a book title next to each of the names on the whiteboard. Then I capped my marker and turned back to the class.

  “What about now?” I asked. “Anyone want to take a stab at it?

  Someone cleared their throat. A few students shifted around in their seats, and a girl sitting in the front row smacked her gum loudly.

  Seriously?! I had just about lost hope for my AP English class, when I saw a hand shoot up from the back of the room.

  “Yes!” I pointed at the student eagerly. “Go ahead! What do you think all of these authors have in common?”

  The poor kid looked like he instantly regretted raising his hand, and he slid down into his desk before he mumbled, “They were all on the summer reading list?”

  My shoulders slumped, and I pressed my lips together firmly to hide my disappointment.

  “That’s technically true,” I said gently. “But that’s not the connection that I’m looking for…”

  There was a murmur of giggles, and the volunteer slid down further in his desk and buried his face. Across the classroom, I heard another student mutter under his breath, “What a fucking idiot…”

  My eyes flicked towards the source of the insult, a kid with a bad Justin Bieber haircut and a Boston Bruins jersey.

  “I didn’t catch that,” I glared at him pointedly, crossing my arms. “Could you say that again?”

  “I didn’t say anything…” he mumbled.

  “Are you sure about that? It sounded like you had an idea that you’d like to share with the rest of the class,” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Come on, let’s hear it. What do you think these authors all have in common?”

  He glared at me, then glanced up at the whiteboard.

  “Uhh….” he shook his head absently, drawing a blank. “They’re all dudes?”

  “Not quite,” I said. “Actually, Ayn Rand is a female author.”

  There was more s
nickering, and Cody Wyatt leaned back in his desk and mumbled,

  “Even I knew that!”

  I sighed and rubbed my forehead. This is going to be a loooong school year…

  I was about to head back to my desk, when I saw Callie Watson hesitantly raise her hand.

  “Callie!” I perked up. “What’s your guess?”

  “Well…um…” she bit her lip nervously, “They’re all famous examples of dystopian literature?”

  “YES!” I pumped my fists into the air enthusiastically. “EXACTLY!”

  Callie slumped forward with relief, and I flashed her a grateful smile.

  “Callie is absolutely right!” I told the class as I turned back to the whiteboard. “Above the list of authors and book titles, I wrote,

  DYSTOPIAN LITERATURE

  “We’re going to spend the next few weeks focusing on dystopian literature,” I announced to the class. “By the end of this unit, you should all be familiar with the authors on this list, as well as the themes and--”

  I was cut off mid-sentence by the loud wailing scream of the fire alarm.

  The classroom buzzed with a murmur of mixed responses, annoyance, amusement, and confusion. Some students laughed and cracked jokes; others clasped their hands over their ears and winced at the loud ringing sound…

  “Is the school on fire?!” the gum-smacking girl in the front row squealed hysterically.

  “Chill out, dude! It’s just a fire drill,” a male student bellowed behind her.

  It was standard procedure to have a series of scheduled fire drills at the beginning of the school year… but I hadn’t gotten any notifications about a drill scheduled for today.

  Either way, I knew the procedure by heart, and I jumped into action.

  “Alright, listen up!” I shouted over the siren. “I need everybody to form a single-file line by the door!”

  I heard a few annoyed groans, and then one by one the students began standing up and packing their bags.

  I grabbed the attendance list from my desk and wedged it under my arm, then I made my way towards the door.

  “We’re going to exit the building together, then assemble at our designated meeting point!” I called out to the class. “It’s very important that you follow me, and that we all stick together. Understood?”