Chapter 6
CAL
Poppy doesn't even say hello.
"Cal, listen to me. Your dad fell. He's hurt. Ambulance is taking him to Harbor Hill General right now."
The kitchen is bright, sunlight cutting across the counter in clean lines, and Poppy's voice doesn't belong here.
It belongs somewhere else, somewhere loud and chaotic, not in this quiet room where the only sound a second ago was ice settling in my glass.
My hand tightens around it. The water trembles.
"H-how bad?"
"Just his leg and he was conscious the whole time," she says, and I hear her trying to give me something to hold onto. "He was talking, was making jokes before the ambulance even got there."
The blood rush in my ears subsides. Okay. Okay. Bones heal. Six weeks in a cast, maybe eight if he's stubborn about physical therapy, which he will be. Back at the bench swearing at walnut before summer.
This is fine. This is manageable. This is a minor inconvenience and a funny story for the diner and nothing more. But my hand is still shaking. Fuck.
Dad is all I have. The thought lands hard and stays there. He's my father, my best friend. The only person who's been there every single day of my life. Broken leg is nothing, but Dad was on the ground and I wasn't there. I set the glass down, like if I move too fast, something else will break.
"I'm on my way."
"Cal?" Her voice goes careful.
"Yeah?" This definitely can't be good.
"Ehm. Lily rode with him in the ambulance."
Everything stops. "Lily?" The name comes out harder than I mean it to. "Why the fuck?"
"She was helping him unload the rocking chair when it happened. The weight shifted and she bumped him and he went down. Cal, she's really upset. She thinks it was her fault. Your dad kept telling her it wasn't but she was…"
Poppy pauses, searching for the right word. "She wouldn't let go of his hand. The paramedic asked if she was family and she said yes."
I stand very still in the kitchen. The house needs to be warmer for when he gets home. I need to call the firehouse. Take time off. Will the recliner be comfortable enough or should I set up the couch? Where are my keys? Is the car charged? Where are my socks?
But the detail that breaks through all of it, the one that sticks like a splinter under skin: She told the paramedic she was family.
"Cal? Are you there?"
"I'm coming." I hang up before she can say anything else.
I give my father's name at the front desk and the woman behind the counter doesn't even look up from her screen before saying, "Room four."
The door to room four is open. I hear him before I see him, chipper as ever, voice carrying down the hallway like he's holding court instead of lying in a hospital bed.
"... and the boy used to follow me around the workshop in his diaper. Couldn't string two words together, but he'd stand at the bench and watch me sand for an hour. Never cried. Never fussed. Just watched with those big eyes of his.”
He chuckles, but there's pain underneath it, and he's trying to hide it from whoever's listening.
"His mother used to say he was born patient. I think he was just born stubborn. He gets that from me."
Dad is telling baby stories about me. To her, of all people. Leg broken, hospital bed, and he's offering warmth like it costs him nothing, like he has an endless supply of it. That's my dad in his entirety.
I step into the doorway and everything I thought I was prepared for flies out the window. Dad is propped up against the pillows, pale, drawn, hospital gown making him look smaller and older than he has any right to look. The pain is visible in the way he holds his body, but his eyes are alert.
He's going to be okay. I knew it the whole drive. But my legs almost give out anyway. Because of her.
Lily is sitting in a chair pulled right up to the mattress, knees pressed against the bed frame, leaning forward with both hands wrapped around one of Dad's.
Her hair falls over one shoulder, tangled from running her hands through it too many times. There's dirt on both sweater sleeves. Gravel, probably, from the driveway. Dark wet patches on both knees of her jeans where she knelt on cold ground beside him.
Her face. Fuck, her face. Bloodshot eyes with lashes still clumped together from crying, nose pink, bottom lip swollen probably from biting it too hard for too long. She looks wrecked. Completely, utterly wrecked.
And Dad… Dad is comforting her. His thumb moves back and forth across her knuckles, and the look on his face is easy, unhurried, like she'd always been his.
I recognize it from childhood. From scraped knees and bad dreams and every moment he ever made feel safe just by being there. Dad always said he was meant to be a girl dad. Knowing him, he already thinks he got his wish.
"Dad."
He glances up, and what's in his eyes says he knows I was scared and wants me to know I don't need to be anymore.
"Hey, son." His smile widens, and the tightness in my chest loosens one notch.
She hasn't let go of Dad's hand. Her eyes are on me, bloodshot and glassy, and I forget what I was about to say.
"Callahan." Her voice is hoarse, shot through from crying. She says my name like an apology.
"Hey." One syllable is all I have.
"I'm sorry." Fresh tears spill over her lashes, down her cheeks, and she doesn't wipe them. Doesn't even seem to notice. "The chair shifted and I stumbled and I bumped him and he fell. I'm so sorry, Callahan, I should have been more careful, I should have…"
I can handle most things at this point in my life. Gray eyes full of tears are not on that list, it seems.
"She didn't do anything wrong." Dad's voice cuts through, firm. He squeezes her hand and fixes me with a look that says fix this.
"The weight moved. Could've happened to anyone. She's been blaming herself since the driveway and she won't hear it from me."
He tips his head toward her, so unsubtle I'm mortified. "Maybe she'll hear it from you."
I stand there as every rule I've built for myself over the last seven months tells me to stay where I am. Keep distance. Closer is dangerous, stupid, will only make things worse. But she's crying and Dad is asking, and the rules don't seem to matter much when she's crying.
I crouch beside her chair, eye level with her now.
Closer than I've been since the flower shop.
Close enough to see individual lashes clumped together.
Close enough to smell something faint under the hospital antiseptic, something that makes my hands want to do things like smooth out her hair and wipe away her tears.
"Eh…Lily." I wait until she looks at me. "It wasn't your fault."
She shakes her head. Stubborn, even now.
"These things happen, okay? He's okay, six to eight weeks, and he'll be back in the workshop driving me crazy."
Her eyes well and spill over, worse than before. My attempt at lightness made it worse. I catch Dad's eye, panicked. He tips his chin toward her, quick and insistent. Twice. Do better.
I'm on my own here.
"You rode with him, stayed with him. That's, ehm…" I swallow. "Very nice of you."
Her chin trembles. She presses her lips together hard, and I watch her fight to hold herself together. I want to touch her face so badly my fingers shake with it.
So I stand and step back.
"Thank you. Uh, for being with him. For staying."
"Of course I stayed." She says it like the alternative doesn't exist in her vocabulary. The easygoing girl who always has mischief in her eyes and never backs down first can't meet my eye.
"I'm going to grab some water," I hear myself say. "Does anyone need anything?"
I need out. I need a break.
"I'm fine, son."
Lily shakes her head, still looking at her lap. I walk out.
I move down the hallway fast, past the nurses' station. A woman in scrubs smiles at me and I smile back because that's what you do, that's what normal people do, and I am a normal person having a normal reaction to a minor family emergency.
There's a door at the end of the corridor that leads to a small courtyard with a bench and a plant in a concrete planter that's seen better decades. Good enough.
The March air hits me like a wall when I step outside. I sit on the bench with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, and I let it come.
It's the adrenaline, that's all. The headache that's been building since Poppy's call, now crashing out in waves. Perfectly normal. Perfectly explainable.
My hands tremble against my temples, and my breath comes short and uneven.
Underneath it all, the thing I never say out loud. The fear that's lived in me since I was eighteen. The terror of leaving my father and not finding him alive. Of losing him too. It sits so close to the surface that a broken leg is enough to crack me wide open.
I'm a man pushing thirty, a firefighter, supposed to be built for emergencies, and I'm not handling a broken leg very well.
And then there's her. What the fuck is going on with me? I don't do this. I don't think like this. This is what Ramsey does. Pining and overthinking and overfeeling. That's his territory, not mine.
I've avoided her for weeks. Done a good job of it, too. And yet one meeting, one moment of being that close to her, and I crumble.
Maybe I should get out of town for a few days, visit my aunt a couple towns over. Find someone else to fuck. Maybe that's the problem, that it's been too long.
Except I can't even remember the last time I was with someone. I only know it was before I met her, which is another level of pathetic.
I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes. Dad is okay. Dad is okay. I focus on that, focus on what matters.
I buy two water bottles from the vending machine and walk back down the hallway. When I walk back in, Dad is propped higher against the pillows, color back in his cheeks, telling Lily about the time he tried to build a canoe that sank in the harbor within forty-five seconds.
She's still in the chair, but her shoulders have dropped from near her ears. The tears have slowed.