5. Reagan
REAGAN
The crew stages on Prospect at first light—three trucks nose to tail—and I stand across the street in yesterday’s clothes pretending I came for coffee.
I didn’t come for coffee. Lea’s isn’t even open. I came to watch a man leave, which is a thing I’ve gotten very good at planning around and very bad at surviving.
Reid finds me before I can decide whether to be found. He’s in his gear, radio on his shoulder, and he crosses the street with the trucks idling behind him. He’s in no hurry at all, as if his crew and a fire two hundred miles south can hold.
He stops close enough that I have to look up. “Came to see me off.”
“I came for coffee.”
“Lea’s is dark.”
“I’m an optimist. It’s a recent condition. I’m sure it’ll pass.” I fold my arms against the cold and against him. “Big morning all around. You have fires, I have a verdict. Very efficient. Everyone gets their bad news before nine.”
“You keep saying that word.”
“It’s my favorite word. It’s the only one that’s never let me down.”
He doesn’t smile. He’s watching me carefully and weighing the look he gets over his fuel numbers.
I can see him deciding something, and I know what’s coming.
He’s going to hand me a reason to hope—give me two weeks, wait for me—and hope is the one thing I can’t hold on a morning when the other shoe is already whistling down.
So I do it first. I always do it first. Losing before anybody can make me is the only kind of winning I’ve ever achieved. I’m very good at it.
“Go,” I tell him, keeping it light. “Last night was good. The best I’ve had—and before it goes to your head, that’s a list of one.
But don’t make it a thing you have to solve from a fire camp.
You have a job that needs you, I have a knife station that might finally be mine, and this—” I wave a hand in the space between us, while something tears loose in me by the root “—this was a nice thing that happened once. Go be a hero. I’ll be fine. I’m always fine.”
For a second, I think he’s going to argue. His jaw sets. His hand comes halfway up, half a motion toward catching my wrist and undoing every efficient word out of my mouth, and God help me, I want him to. I want him to call the lie a lie. I want to be a woman somebody fights the fire schedule for.
But I’ve spent two days teaching him I’m independent. I built the door and propped it open myself, and now I watch him do the reasonable thing. The thing everyone does when I make leaving this simple.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, Reagan.”
Something goes out of his face. I’ve seen it on everybody—the moment a person takes the exit you held open, because you made it easy, because easy is what you’re for.
“If that’s what you want,” he says.
No. It is the farthest thing from what I want. What I want is to grab the front of his gear and tell him two weeks is nothing, tell him to come back and find out if this is the realest thing either of us has ever touched—
“That’s what I want,” I say.
A horn goes up the line. Somebody calls his name—the boss, the one his crew is waiting on. He holds my eyes one more second, giving me one more chance to take it back, and I give him nothing, because nothing is safe, because nothing can’t be taken from me.
He goes.
The trucks pull out one by one down Prospect, and I stand in yesterday’s clothes and watch the good thing roll south, right on schedule, and I don’t chase it. I have never once chased it. Chasing is for people who think they’ll catch something.
I don’t go home. Home is a rented room with a bed I didn’t sleep in, and it’s too close to a patio I can’t think about yet, so I walk.
I walk Prospect end to end while the town wakes up gold around me—past Lea finally flipping her sign, past the bench where a braver woman might have sat down and cried.
I keep my feet moving. Moving before the nerve catches up is the only trick I’ve got, and it’s a lie too, because there’s no nerve left.
I spent the last of it in the dark last night, being brave, and look where brave got me.
By the time the clock crawls to two, I’ve talked myself most of the way back to fine.
Marchetti calls me into his office before I have my apron tied, clipboard in hand. I stand in front of the desk where my whole year gets decided and wait to hear Denver’s name.
“The permanent sous position.” He looks up. I already have my face arranged for it, the good-loser face, the one I keep pressed and ready. “It’s yours. You outworked everyone I brought in. You own that kitchen, Reagan—it’s been yours all week. I just wanted to see if you knew it.”
For one whole second, all is right with the world.
I won. My turn came. After twenty-three years of the bus stopping one block early, it pulled to the curb and opened its doors, and I got it—the permanent slot, my name on it.
But the victory feels empty.
That’s the part nobody warns you about—the part I’d have laughed at a week ago. My whole life, I’ve been sure winning would fix me. Get the spot, prove I’m not the easy one or the second choice, and the empty place inside would finally fill in.
Well. I got the spot. And the empty place hasn’t budged. Because what I was missing was never a job—it was somebody looking at me and seeing something worth the drive.
For two days, somebody did. I felt full for the first time in my life and didn’t even notice it was him doing it. Now he’s on a highway going south, I’m standing here holding the one thing I always wanted, and I’d trade it in a heartbeat for the nerve I didn’t have two hours ago.
Marchetti’s still talking—something about the line, about me proving him wrong. I say thank you. I say all the right things. Then I tie my apron and go stand at my station—the permanent one, finally mine—and pick up my knife to break down the fish for a service I get to keep.
My hands know the work. They do it without me. And somewhere south of here, a truck full of men gets smaller on a map I can’t read, carrying the only person who ever bet on me before I did. I let him go, because letting go first is the one thing I’ve always been good at.
Efficient to the end.