We Don’t Talk About Flagstaff #2
"There was no hesitation, which is suspicious, because an innocent person would need a moment to even consider the question—"
"I am not in a firefighter calendar."
"Okay." She picked up a fry. "But just so you know, if you were, I would absolutely buy it. For the library. As a community resource."
I stared at her. "As a community resource."
"Educational." She nodded serenely. "Fire safety awareness. Very important."
"You would put a sexy firefighter calendar in a public library."
"In the reference section." She took a bite of her fry. "Under local community resources. Completely dignified."
I looked at the ceiling for a moment. The ceiling of Rosie's had a water stain shaped vaguely like my mother's pug/beagle mix, which my mother said was a Puggle (look it up), named Bozo. I had noticed it five years ago and was noticing it again now.
"You're a little weird," I said.
"Oh, it is fully intentional." She leaned forward, the florescent diner lighting catching the gold in her hair. "So. The helicopter. Walk me through it. You get the call, and then what happens?"
So I told her. And she listened intently, like she'd never been part of a more interesting conversation.
The kind of listening that made you hear what you were actually saying for the first time.
I told her about the rappel, about reading a fire's behavior from altitude, about the way you learned to watch the wind move through a tree line like a sentence you had to translate fast or something went wrong.
She asked smart questions, specific ones, the kind that meant she was actually tracking what I was saying rather than waiting for her turn to speak.
"So you're reading it," she said. "The fire. Like text."
"I guess, yeah."
She pointed at me. "Narrative rescue," she said. "We're the same."
I almost smiled. "We are not the same. One of us rappels from helicopters."
"And one of us handles the Tuesday ghost neighbor.
We all have our community burdens." She sipped her coffee.
"I'm serious, though. You read patterns to stop destruction.
I read people to find them what they need.
Both of those things are just—paying attention.
" She turned her mug in her hands. "Most people don't."
I looked at her across the table, this woman who had walked into my apartment building's hallway in Mary Janes and proceeded to take me completely apart one observation at a time, and thought: this is the kind of encounter that happens once.
Maybe twice if the universe is feeling generous. Not to people like me, usually.
But sometimes.
The diner emptied around us, and the waitress had begun deploying significant glances in our direction. When Vera finally looked at her watch, her eyes went wide.
"Oh my god, it's almost ten."
"Don't apologize."
"I was going to say I'm impressed with myself, actually." She reached for the check before I could. I reached too. We had a brief, dignified disagreement.
"I asked you out," she said firmly. "I pay."
"That's not—"
"Petra." She gave me a look of remarkable patience, steady as bedrock. "I'm not letting you pay because you're wearing boy clothes. You're still a girl, just like me. Arguably more girl than me in some respects, given that I once cried at a hardware store commercial."
"You—what?"
"There was a dad teaching his daughter to fix things." She didn't blink. "It was very touching. Focus."
She paid. I let her, mostly because I was still processing the hardware store commercial.
It was so genuinely, specifically absurd that it looped around into being one of the most endearing things I'd ever heard, and I kept my expression neutral only through years of military discipline that had never anticipated needing to be deployed for this exact situation.
"The commercial," I said, as we stood to leave.
"We don't have to—"
"What brand?"
She looked at me for a moment. "Home Depot."
"Home Depot made you cry."
"It was a very good ad."
"Home Depot."
"The daughter fixed a birdhouse, Petra. With her dad's guidance. And then the birds came." She pulled on her Antique Bridal Whisper cardigan. "I'm not made of stone."
I held the door open for her and followed her out into the night, and I was smiling so hard it was starting to constitute a serious concern.
Outside, the desert air had cooled into sage and distant rain and the dry mineral smell of land that had been hot all day and was only now exhaling.
Vera pulled her cardigan tighter as we walked to the parking lot.
My motorcycle glinted silver and black in the moonlight, the red and orange flames painted along the tank catching the light like a fire still burning.
"I had a really good time," she said.
"Me too."
We stood there, neither of us quite ready to break the particular spell of a night that had gone better than either of us had any right to expect.
The space between us hummed quietly. San Jacinto had that quality sometimes, the desert around it enormous and dark and ancient, the sky thick with stars out this far from the big cities of Arizona.
The kind of sky that made you feel both very small and somehow, inexplicably, enormous.
"Your flames match your jacket," she said, nodding at the bike.
I looked. The painted flames on the tank. The red embroidery on my jacket. "Miller is going to be so insufferable when I tell him that."
"Tell him I said he has an eye for it."
"Absolutely not. He'll embroider your name on something."
She considered this. "I could think of worse things." The moonlight caught the edge of her smile, the way it caught the gold in her hair, making luminous everything it touched. "Goodnight, Petra."
"Goodnight, Vera."
She turned toward Daisy. Turned back, once, the way she had in the hallway. I was starting to suspect she knew exactly what she was doing when she did that.
"One more question," she said.
"Yeah?"
"The duct tape boot. Did you wear it on purpose tonight, or did you forget?"
I looked down. Silver duct tape, gleaming faithfully in the moonlight, performing its duty without complaint or recognition.
"I forgot," I admitted.
She nodded gravely. "I figured." She opened Daisy's door. "It was very chaotic sincere of you."
I watched her drive away, Daisy's taillights rounding the corner and vanishing into the dark, and stood in the empty parking lot for a long time after.
The desert spread out around San Jacinto in every direction, vast and indifferent and utterly unchanged by the night I'd just had, the way it had always been, the way it always would be, long after everything else changed.
But something had shifted in the middle of it. Something small and warm and completely unprecedented, like a single lit match in a cavernous, dark room.
I looked down at my boot.
Chaotic sincere.
I was absolutely, completely screwed.
And for the first time in my adult life, the thought felt a lot like something I'd started thinking I wouldn't feel again when I'd come home from war eight years ago.
It felt like relief.