16. She’s Handled Mrs. Martinez’s Feelings About Email Attachments
She's Handled Mrs. Martinez's Feelings About Email Attachments
Chapter Sixteen
The annual station barbecue was a tradition that went back decades, long enough that the actual origin story had become mythology.
Rodriguez claimed it started as a morale initiative after a particularly brutal season in the nineties, when they'd lost a structure and come within forty feet of losing two people, and someone had decided the crew needed to eat together and drink together and remember they were still alive.
Jackson claimed it started because someone accidentally ordered twelve cases of beer instead of one, and they'd had to do something with them.
Miller, when asked, said he couldn't remember and didn't see why it mattered.
The truth was probably somewhere in the middle.
What mattered in practice was that every year, before fire season hit full stride, the permanent crew and all the seasonal firefighters gathered at Station 19 with their partners and families for one last relaxed afternoon before the chaos.
Food, drinks, cornhole, and that chaotic goblin-like brand of humor that emerged when you put people who regularly faced death together in a parking lot with a grill and no immediate emergency.
It was, in its way, a kind of census. You looked around at everyone who'd made it through another off-season.
You noted who'd come back, who hadn't, who'd brought someone new.
The seasonals came back in early spring after months away, and some of them had other jobs in the winter, some of them had been on assignment elsewhere in the country, some of them had just gone home and waited.
They were a known quantity, most of them.
Faces that belonged to the season, to the work, to the particular culture of a helitack station in the Arizona desert.
Not family exactly, but something adjacent to it.
People you trusted with your life every summer for reasons that had been established and re-established over years of shared dangerous work.
I'd been to six of these. Never brought anyone before.
Never had anyone to bring.
"You're doing the jaw thing," Vera said, as I pulled into the station lot.
"I don't have a jaw thing."
"You absolutely have a jaw thing. It goes tight right here—" she reached over and touched the hinge of my jaw with two fingers, "—when you're nervous." She tilted her head. "You're nervous."
"I'm not nervous."
"You checked the potato salad three times on the drive here."
"I wanted to make sure it wasn't going to spill."
"You checked it at a red light. It was in a sealed container. In a bag. Inside a cooler." She looked at me with enormous, fond patience. "Petra. They already love me. The cookie afternoon happened. Miller and I have a vanilla extract correspondence."
"It's different with the seasonals. This is the whole crew, all at once."
"I've handled difficult patrons, a fire crew's baking afternoon, and Mrs. Martinez's feelings about email attachments." She smoothed her red sundress, serene as a person who had never in her life encountered a room she couldn't win. "I will survive a barbecue."
"They're going to do something embarrassing," I said. "I just know it. I can feel it."
"Define embarrassing."
"I don't know yet. That's what makes it concerning."
She laughed, took the potato salad from me when I got out of the truck, and waited while I came around to her side.
I looked at her in the afternoon light, at the red dress, the waves in her hair, the expression of someone who found me unreasonable in the best possible way, and felt that helplessness of being very in love with someone who was about to walk into a room full of people who were going to either embarrass me or embarrass themselves on my behalf.
"Stop staring," she said, already walking. "Or we'll be late."
"We're not late."
"We will be if you keep staring."
The barbecue was in full swing when we rounded the corner of the station to the back patio.
The smell of grilling meat hit first, then the sounds; music from someone's Bluetooth speaker, the distant thwack of cornhole bags, three separate conversations happening at different volumes, the lawlessness between people who had been cooped up through an off-season and were enjoying being in the same place again.
I located my crew by triangulation, the way I always did: Rodriguez at the grill with the expression of a man who took barbecue seriously and would not be accepting unsolicited feedback about it; Miller at a picnic table, beer in hand, watching everything with that signature stillness because he had been watching things quietly for thirty years and found it more valuable than participating; Jackson in the middle of what appeared to be a heated cornhole dispute with two of the seasonals returning from a California assignment; and Stevens—
Stevens was on the roof of the brush truck.
"Why?" I said.
"There's a frisbee up there," Jackson called over without looking up from the cornhole dispute, which had reached the pointing-at-each-other stage. "He's been up there for twenty minutes. We've stopped asking."
"Stevens," I said calmly. "Get down. Now."
"I almost have it," Stevens called back, his arm extended toward something I couldn't see from the ground. "It went really far."
"It is not worth it."
"It's my good frisbee."
"There's no such—"
"It has flames on it."
I looked at Jackson. Jackson looked at me. We both looked at the roof of the brush truck.
"Stevens," Miller said, without raising his voice or looking up from his beer.
Stevens got down.
He landed in front of us covered in a fine layer of dirt and what appeared to be a stain of something I chose not to identify, and held up the frisbee with a triumphant grin.
"Got it," he said.
"Brandon," Vera said pleasantly, "that looks like a very nice frisbee."
Stevens looked at her. Looked at the frisbee. Looked back at her. He stood slightly straighter. "Thank you, Vera. It has flames on it."
"I can see that. Very appropriate for your line of work."
He pointed at her. "That's exactly what I thought when I bought it."
He walked away with his dignity somehow entirely intact, which was a gift he had likely been born with, and Vera turned to me with an expression that said see? Fine.
Rodriguez had appeared at our side during the roof incident, grill tongs in hand. He looked at Vera with that cool, calm assessment he gave everything at the station. "Welcome."
"Captain Rodriguez." She shook his hand, smiling brightly. "The grill smells incredible."
"Tri-tip and jalapeno sausage. My wife's marinade." He looked at the tongs, then back at Vera. "She sends her apologies for not being here. Book club conflict."
Vera's eyes lit up and I almost laughed. "What are they reading?"
"Something about a woman in Scotland. There are apparently standing stones involved. And time travel. I don't know."
"Outlander," Vera said immediately.
Rodriguez pointed the tongs at her. "That's it."
"Tell her I have opinions when she's done. Strong ones. Tell her specifically to find me before she reads the second book."
Rodriguez looked at her. Then at me. Then back at her with what I could only describe as visible approval. "I'll tell her."
He returned to the grill, and Vera turned to find Jackson standing directly behind her, his wife Cassie at his elbow. They were both grinning ear to ear, dressed in matching fire-engine red outfits. It was no wonder they'd ended up together.
"Vera Montgomery," Jackson said. "This is Cassie, who has heard about you specifically in the context of a chocolate chip cookie and has been wanting to discuss it."
"The brown butter," Vera guessed.
Cassie pointed at her husband. "He won't tell me how it works. He says it's a technique that requires in-person demonstration."
"It's not—" Vera glanced at Jackson, who chose at that moment to observe something nonexistent on the ceiling. "Jackson. I explained it."
"I know how it works," Jackson said. "I'm not telling her because then she'll make them twice a week and I'll eat seventeen in a sitting. Again."
"Again?" I said.
"The cookie afternoon," Jackson said, with the gravity of a confession. "I don't want to revisit it."
"He ate seventeen cookies," Cassie said, and I could tell by her tone that she'd counted.
"It was a high-stress week—"
"It was a Tuesday."
Vera took Cassie's arm casually, as if they'd been friends for years. "Let me tell you everything," she said, and they moved off together, already whispering and giggling hysterically.
Jackson watched them go. "She's going to tell her about the brown butter."
"You did this to yourself," I said.
"I know," he said. "It's fine. I'm completely fine."
The seasonals filtered in over the course of the next hour, which was its own kind of event.
The seasonals at Station 19 were all a specific type of person.
Most of them came back year after year, which was a condition of this kind of work, where you started as a Type 2 trainee, did your pack test and your guard school, earned your red card, and then came back to the same station the following spring because you knew the terrain and you knew the crew and the crew knew you could be trusted on the line.
Some of them were college students working summers.
Some of them were making their way toward permanent positions, building the hours and certifications you needed to move up the ladder toward squad boss, toward crew boss, toward a permanent slot.
Some of them just liked the work and the season and went home in October and did other things until March.
Davids was in his fifth season. He knew the equipment bay as well as any permanent member, ran his rescue harness with the expertise of a firefighter who had done it several hundred times, and had been involved in three significant saves over the years that Rodriguez mentioned when he talked about the crew's record.
He was, by all operational measures, a person whose judgment you trusted on a fire line.