There, staring out at me with familiar wide eyes, was my own face. I sucked in a harsh breath, surprise flooding me at seeing myself here, in Sam’s office, rendered with such care and detail. The drawing was good—it was beyond good, actually. As I considered my own face, I realized two things. For one thing, Sam wasn’t just a drafter; he was an artist. I wondered why he kept it hidden. And secondly, when Sam drew me…I was beautiful.
Conflicting emotions rose inside me. Once the shock had worn off, confusion began to bubble in my veins. How should I feel about this? How strange it was to think of Sam standing in here and focusing like this on every little detail of my face, my hair. I was flattered. Sam was clearly talented. I was honored that he’d use that talent to render my image, but it was still strange. Why would he focus on me this way? As far as I knew, Sam’s concern for me was limited to figuring out ways to make me miserable, or at least to embarrass me. His offer to help me catch Chance’s eye had been totally out of character and I still didn’t know what to make of it any more than I knew what to make of this incredible portrait.
My own face stared at me knowingly, and I dropped the other sheets back over it. I had no idea how to feel about what I’d found, and guilt surged through me. I shouldn’t have been snooping in the first place. I didn’t know why Sam would draw me, but it wasn’t my business, and it didn’t change anything. He was probably just practicing. Or maybe he’d use this to throw darts at later. He probably drew everyone in town.
I moved over to the phone and called my house, my brain spinning.
“Hello?”
“Mom,” I said, her familiar voice washing some of the turmoil from my mind. “How are you?”
“Well, your father just called. He said the fire—”
“I just spoke to him,” I told her. “I wanted to be sure you were okay.”
“I’ve got the fire box in the car just in case,” she said. We’d kept all of our family papers in a fireproof box for as long as I could remember.
“Good,” I said. “I think we’ve got time, so maybe we should grab as much other stuff as we can? Photos? Grandma’s quilt?”
“Right. I’ve been making a list.” Mom loved lists. “And I called your Aunt Steele to let her know we might be coming to stay for a bit.” Aunt Steele was Mom’s sister, who lived in Petaluma.
“You’ve got it all organized.” Hearing my mom so put together made me proud. I could never predict any more when she might fall apart and when she’d master a situation completely, but I should have known that Mom would be reliable in a time of real trouble. “I’ll be home in a bit, okay? Just going to help Chance organize stuff here first.”
“He’s lucky to have you.”
I sighed. If only.
Sam was back in the office before long, and ten men stood out on the sidewalk in front of the building. “I’ve got as many guys as we could find,” he said, calling into Chance’s office. “You ready to head out?”
I followed Chance and Sam outside where they got the bobcats and dozers ready to haul around the fire road to help clear the debris on the hillsides. Men piled into the truck cabs, and I recognized Mr. Adams from the Village, along with John Trench and Maddie’s brother Cameron. Dean and Frank must’ve come over from the diner, and they jumped into the cab of a truck beside Sam. Jack Stiles and Connor and even Mr. Allen had come to help.
As I watched all these local men pull together and set out to try to save our community, something in my heart twinged. This place, these old trees and the tiny little impermanent buildings beneath them, they were our tiny piece of the world and it was touching to see how much the men who lived here were willing to do to save it. Engines rumbled to life and before long the Palmer parking lot was a riot of gravel crunching and gears grinding, and I stepped back onto the pavement next to the backdoor of the building, feeling a little lost. Chance waved from the wheel of one of the trucks, and then pulled out of the parking lot. I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do alone at Palmer. I hadn’t been working here long enough to have a lot of self-directed tasking.
The last truck began to move, and then ground to a stop in front of where I stood. Sam slid down from the lofty cab and walked around from the driver’s side.
“You gonna be okay here for a bit, Miranda?” His blue gray eyes were dark, concerned, and his tone was soft and careful.
My discovery of the drawing still pulled at me, made me unsure what kind of ground I stood on here with the younger Palmer brother. I was so used to not trusting him, but now I felt like I carried some secret of his—one I didn’t understand. “I guess so,” I shrugged.
“We’ll be out a few hours,” Sam said, glancing at the line of big trucks moving out of the parking lot and onto the highway, heading north. “We’ll do what we can and then head back. Can you be the operations center here? I can call you from the truck radio. Maybe you can keep the ranger station informed of our progress, and let us know if anything happens?”
“I can do that,” I assured him, glad to have some direction.
Sam’s eyes stayed locked on mine for a minute, and I wasn’t sure why, but the tension made me a little dizzy and I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands suddenly, so I shoved them into my back pockets. “I’m glad you’re here,” Sam said quietly.
I scrunched up my face and gave him a questioning look. “I live here. Where else would I be?”
“I meant at Palmer,” he said. “With me.”
“Oh.” It was debatable whether I was at Palmer to be with Sam, but whatever softness had found its way into his voice, into the air between us, was something I didn’t want to contradict, and something inside me even reached toward it, using it for warmth and comfort in the midst of a scary situation, so I went with it. Even Sam knew that if I was at Palmer to be with anyone, it was Chance. But it was still nice to hear that someone was glad I was here. “Okay,” I said, beginning to feel uncomfortable under Sam’s intense gaze. He seemed to be trying to decide something, figure something out, and then he took a step back and grinned, and the moment broke.
“Right. I’ll be in touch. You have the conn.”
“I have the what?”
“Yeah, the control. Of the ship. It’s from Star Trek.”
“So there’s no way I’d know what you’re talking about.”
Sam lifted a shoulder. “Nothing new there.”
And he was back. The Sam who wanted to make fun of me and point out how little I knew. I turned and went inside, a strange mix of feelings swirling inside me as I listened to the sound of the huge truck move past the building and out onto the road.
As I sat at my desk stress-eating chocolate-covered raisins, a million thoughts and memories swirled through my mind. The morning I’d spent with Chance and the tension that came with worrying about fire consuming my childhood home must’ve launched me into a contemplative mood, because suddenly I was sorting through a host of memories from the years I’d spent here. The weird thing was how often Sam popped up in those memories, even when I was searching them for a glimpse of Chance. If there was one thing I could say about Sam Palmer, it was that he’d always been there.
Chapter 14
Miranda
It was dark when the trucks rumbled back into the parking lot behind Palmer, and I stepped out to watch them move back into neat lines across the gravel expanse. The men tumbled from the cabs of the trucks, faces smeared with dirt and serious expressions. As they stood in a loose group in front of me, I thought I could smell the woodsy char of smoke, but it might have just been my imagination.
“How did it go?” I asked Sam when he’d thanked the men and walked toward me. Chance stayed with the small group wandering off toward the diner.
“We did a lot,” Sam said, and I could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “The hills are so steep the bobcats weren’t a huge help for a lot of it. We had guys up there just pulling branches and stuff down the hill with shovels and their hands until the machinery could get to i
t.”
I’d hiked the ridge, and knew the terrain above the old fire road. It was dense and covered with decades of debris. There’d been so much controversy about controlled burns in recent years that the forest service hadn’t cleared spaces around the park like they used to, and the accumulated branches, pine cones and needles that covered the ground were basically kindling for any sparks that found them. I cringed as I considered how vulnerable we were up here.
Sam and I went back into the building, and he settled into the leather chair in the front office, rubbing one hand over his jaw. I wasn’t sure what to do, or if I was done for the day, so I sat back down at my desk. After a minute, Sam got up again and went into Chance’s office, returning with two bottles in his hand. “Have a beer with me?”
I accepted the bottle, watching Sam carefully as he dropped back into the chair. When Sam was around, I’d always felt a need to be on my guard, to protect myself. But right now, there was something about him that seemed vulnerable and exposed. I almost felt like I should be comforting him somehow. Instead, I just held the cool bottle between my hands and said nothing.
Sam took a long pull from the beer in his hands and leaned back in the chair, his gaze locked on something only he could see, out in the distance beyond the walls of the room. “You ever think about what a weird place this is, Miranda? How different it must have been to have grown up somewhere else? In a big city or something?”
I lifted a shoulder and swiveled in my chair. “Sometimes.”
“Like in the movies we used to watch about high school kids, right? Big schools with football teams and cheerleaders…” he trailed off. Our school had none of those things. Our graduating class had been just over fifty kids. “I used to think about what we were missing,” Sam continued. “I used to want all that, to be in a place with more people, more opportunity, more…everything.”
“And you don’t now?” I asked.
Sam’s eyes found mine for a moment, and then he looked away again. “I don’t know.”
I was sweating, but I couldn’t have explained why. I hadn’t noticed it before Sam had given me that look. Why did he mess with me like this? I let out an exasperated sigh.
“Sorry,” he said, taking my sigh for a sign of impatience. “It just makes you think, you know? Working all day to try to save a place I’ve wished my whole life to escape. It made me think about what we’d be saving…or losing. The people here, the quaint little town, the way everyone knows everything about everyone else… I don’t think it’d be like that in most other places. It’d be a shame to lose it all.”
That was an understatement. “I can’t imagine losing it all… my parents…” I squeezed my eyes shut. Sam’s family was gone. He might be fond of the people here, the buildings. But if his house burned down, he’d just go somewhere else. My family was still here, my parents were a part of these mountains. I couldn’t imagine them in a city.
“I know.” Sam’s voice was softer. “I hope they can stop it.”
I took a sip of the beer Sam had given me, and couldn’t help wrinkling my nose as the cold liquid slid across my tongue. It wasn’t bad though, and I took another sip. “Do you think you’ll stay here?” I’d never really talked to Sam about his plans, had always just taken for granted that he’d be here, at Palmer. “I mean, if things burn down?”
“I wasn’t planning to stay either way,” Sam said, and surprise flooded me, making me shiver unexpectedly.
“Really?” I asked.
He smiled, but there was no glee in the expression, it was a sad smile. “There’s not much for me up here,” he said. “And I’d like to meet someone one day, have a family.”
That made me smile. “I could actually see you being a really good dad,” I said.
He squinted at me. “You say that like it surprises you.”
“Just never thought about you that way before.”
Something dark passed through Sam’s eyes and he dropped my gaze as he said in a low voice, “I know.”
“What would you do if you left here?” I was curious, but I also felt like maybe if someone braver told me their plans, it could help me make my own. “Where would you go?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said, catching my eye again. “Maybe down to Sacramento to run things at the office there, maybe out toward the Pacific. I guess wherever I could find work, or convince Chance to set up a Palmer office.”
“So you’d stay in construction?”
“That’s the gig, I guess. I don’t know much else.”
I nodded, thinking about how little I’d explored the state I’d grown up in. I couldn’t picture myself living anywhere but on the side of a mountain. I might have dreamed about it for years, but now that my home was being threatened, I couldn’t imagine leaving.
“Did you get any updates from your dad?” Sam asked.
“Not really. He called over just before you guys came back in. He said nothing had really changed. They’ve got part of it contained, but the leading edge is still coming this way.”
Sam nodded. “We’ll move most of the equipment down to the lot in Sacramento over the next couple days,” he said. His voice sounded hollow.
“Anything you need me to do to help?”
“There’ll be some calls to make—letting people know our plans for now, rescheduling. Or just halting work until the threat passes.”
I nodded and took another sip of the beer. My skin felt a little tingly and my head felt lighter. Something about the feeling seemed right after the stress of the afternoon.
“You don’t have to stay,” Sam said. “If you need to get going, or if you wanted to head over to the diner. With Chance.”
I’d tried to catch Chance’s eye as he’d dropped down from the cab of one of the trucks when the men had come back. He’d been all long legs and broad shoulders, smeared with the dirt of the mountains and looking every bit the hero. But he hadn’t even looked my way, had just clapped another man on the back and headed across the parking lot. I shrugged. “Nothing’s ever going to happen between me and Chance. I might as well admit it.”
Sam shifted his weight slowly forward in the chair, pressing his lips into a line and seeming to think. “Might take some time,” he said.
“He’s known me my whole life.” How much more time could he need? “He’s just not interested in me.” Something about the darkness outside and the quiet bubble here in the little office had me revealing more to Sam than I normally would. He wasn’t exactly my favorite confidante.
“He’s an idiot.” Sam’s voice was bitter. I was used to Sam and Chance picking on each other, and when Sam said things like that, I usually chalked it up to jealousy or sour grapes. But when he said this, it sounded like something else.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m a small town girl. I never really thought I had a shot with him…I just…” I trailed off.
“I know,” Sam said, and I wondered what he knew.
“If you agree, why did you say you’d help me?”
He cocked his head to the side and a lock of dark brown hair fell across his eyes. “What? No, I don’t agree. I said ‘I know’ because I know you think of yourself as less than you are. I don’t like the way you undervalue yourself, Miranda. And I said I’d help you because…” It was Sam’s turn to trail off. “I just want to see you happy.”
My mouth might have dropped open slightly. “Really.” It wasn’t a question. I was so used to Sam having some kind of angle, or looking for the joke in things, that I wasn’t sure how to react to the nicest thing he’d ever said to me.
“I guess it’s my fault you don’t think I’d want to do something nice for you. I’ve always been—”
“Sort of a jerk.”
“I was going to say kind of oblivious.” He smiled. “Jerk works too, I guess.”
“Sorry,” I said quickly.
He laughed lightly and his eyes crinkled at the corners. I wondered why I’d never noticed how handsome he was when he smiled like
that, or how nice his voice was, all deep and low with an edge of humor always waiting there. “Maybe I’ve always been kind of a jerk to you because—”
“Hey guys.” The door swung open, hitting the office wall as Chance stepped inside. “Burning the midnight oil?”
I looked at my watch. It was after eight o’clock, and I knew my mother would be worried. “Oh wow, it’s gotten late. I’d better get home.” I stood and gathered my things. For some reason I was finding it difficult to look at either Palmer brother as I pulled my purse onto my shoulder and dug for my car keys. “See you guys tomorrow,” I said, moving toward the door.
“Good night,” Sam and Chance said at once, and I stepped out into the darkening night. The smell of smoke filled the air and my eyes teared up, but I wasn’t sure if the smoke was to blame.
Chapter 15
Sam
Chance stood in the middle of the office, having no idea what he’d just interrupted. I stared at him as he stood there in all his oblivious glory, his perfect champion good looks shining as usual. He raised an eyebrow at me and chuckled. “What’s got up your butt? You should’ve come to the diner and had a few beers with us.”
I raised the beer I still held in my hand. “Had one here.”
Love Reimagined Page 9
