Chapter 7
The Cobbler Cove Fire Department consisted of one aging fire engine, one ambulance, one building that, until very recently, smelled like motor oil and mouse droppings, and exactly zero qualified drivers.
Gray intended to fix the last part of that.
He’d passed the ambulance driving certification on his second try, which Tucker said was respectable and Cooper said was “about what I’d expect from the brother who reads more than he drives.
” The ambulance was essentially a large van with medical equipment bolted into it.
It went where you pointed it. The steering was responsive. The mirrors made sense.
The fire engine was a different beast entirely.
It was a 1998 Pierce Saber, thirty-one feet long, eleven feet tall, and about as maneuverable as a freight train on ice.
The steering had a two-second delay that made every correction feel like a suggestion rather than a command.
The mirrors were positioned for a driver roughly the height of a professional basketball player, which meant he could see either the sky or the rear bumper but never both at the same time.
Forward driving was manageable. He’d taken the engine out on back roads twice and made it back to the station without incident.
He learned its braking distance when empty and when filled with 1500 gallons of water.
The two were wildly different. With practice he even figured out how to navigate wide turns.
But backing up the engine was going to be the death of him. He had no idea if he was ever going to get the engine back into its parking bay. For the past several days, he’d had to park it in front of the station because he couldn’t get it back into its usual parking spot.
The bay door was fourteen feet wide. The engine was eight feet, four inches wide. That left two feet, ten inches of clearance on each side. Which sounded easy.
But in practical reality, it was impossible to hit.
The approach required a reverse arc from the gravel apron into the bay at a specific angle that compensated for the engine’s turning radius, the slight grade of the concrete pad, and the fact that the left bay door track was warped by approximately three-quarters of an inch.
He understood the geometry perfectly. He had, in fact, diagrammed it in his notebook, calculated the optimal approach angle, and identified the precise point at which to begin the reverse arc.
None of his calculations or diagrams helped.
On his first attempt, he clipped the right door frame and scraped a stripe of red paint onto the metal track. It had taken a whole day and Boone’s expert help at repainting door panels to repair the damage to the truck and track.
On his second attempt, he overcorrected and took out both orange traffic cones Sully had set up as guides. Thankfully, Sully had shouted urgently at him to stop, and he’d missed backing the expensive stainless steel hose valve on the back of the truck into the brick wall of the fire station.
On his third attempt, he somehow managed to end up at a forty-five-degree angle to the bay opening, which was geometrically impressive and operationally useless. Sully, who had been watching from a folding chair and sipping on a beer, said merely, “Well. That’s creative.”
Gray did not find this encouraging.
But he came back the next day. And the day after that. He set up the cones fresh each morning and systematically destroyed them each afternoon. He kept a log in his notebook: date, attempt number, angle of approach, point of failure, cones lost.
The data was not encouraging either. By Thursday of the first week, he’d flattened fourteen cones and developed a persistent twitch in his left eye that appeared whenever he shifted into reverse.
The problem, he eventually concluded, was not the math.
The problem was that thirty-one feet of steel did not behave the way the math said it should.
There was slop in the steering column. The rear axle tracked differently on gravel than on concrete.
The mirrors vibrated at low speeds, turning his reference points into impressionist paintings.
He understood fire at the molecular level—the oxidation chain, the heat transfer coefficients, the fluid dynamics of smoke. He could calculate flame spread rates in his head. But he could not get a truck through a hole that was five feet wider than said truck.
By the second week, word had gotten out.
He blamed the pinochle posse. Ruth Sanger’s gossip network operated at a speed that violated several known laws of physics, and the spectacle of the youngest Lawton brother waging war against traffic cones was exactly the sort of information her network was built to disseminate.
People started showing up at the station to watch.
As it turned out, having an audience did nothing to improve Gray’s performance. In fact, his ability to back up deteriorated in direct proportion to how many people were observing his efforts.
By Wednesday of the second week, there were four pickup trucks parked along the street and Walter Meeks sat on the tailgate of his with a bag of peanuts, as if it was a movie matinee.
“You’re cutting too early,” Walter called out after attempt number twenty-three ended with two cones down and a noise from the right rear tire that Gray preferred not to identify.
“Thank you, Walter,” Gray said with all the patience he could muster, which wasn’t much.
“You need to let the tail swing wider before you commit.”
“I appreciate the input.”
“My nephew backed a thirty-six-foot horse trailer through a barn door with six inches to spare on each side. First try. Course, he’d been driving since he was twelve.”
Gray did not deign to respond. He reset the cones.
Friday afternoon the school bus stopped in front of the fire station, and Gray watched in surprise as Noah bounded off the bus and Cassidy hopped down more slowly. Noah marched up to Gray with his notebook in hand, already open, and announced, “I’m gonna be your co-pilot today.”
“I don’t need a co-pilot.”
“Yes, you do. You’ve knocked over twenty-six cones.”
“How on earth do you know that?” Gray blurted.
“Sully and Tucker are taking turns keeping count. Jenna and Molly compare tallies every day, and they call my mom every night to tell her how many cones you hit that day.”
“You’re kidding.”
Noah grinned. “Cassidy’s keeping the official record, but I’ve been keeping my own.” He held up his notebook. The page was covered in tally marks organized by date. It was, Gray had to admit, methodologically sound.
Gray looked over at Cassidy and muttered, “Et tu, Brute?”
She frowned, confused.
He explained, “It’s Latin for, And you, Brutus? They were the last words Julius Caesar said before his best friend betrayed him and murdered him. They meant, Even you betrayed me, too?”
“Who’s Julius Caesar?” Noah demanded.
Cassidy answered, “The Emperor of Rome two thousand years ago. He was a soldier.”
“You’d enjoy reading about him,” Gray added.
Noah scribbled in his notebook as Cassidy looked around for a place to sit. Gray fetched the lawn chair that Sully favored and set it well away from the garage doors for her.
Noah clambered up into the passenger seat of the engine without waiting for permission, which seemed to be his standard approach to most situations. He buckled himself in and consulted his notebook as Gray settled himself behind the wheel.
Noah said briskly, “Okay. I’ve been thinking about your problem, and I think you should go slower.”
“I’m already going as slow as the engine will move in reverse.”
“Then go more left.”
“If I go more left, I’ll hit the door frame.”
“Then go more right.”
“Noah.”
“What?”
“Directional advice requires knowing which direction is correct.”
Noah considered this seriously. “What if I stand behind the truck and tell you when you’re about to hit something?”
“Absolutely not. You’re not standing behind a moving fire engine.”
“I’d be really far back.”
“No.”
“Fine.” Noah settled back in his seat. “I guess I’ll give you moral support.”
Gray made another attempt. He got the angle right this time—he could feel it, the geometry was right—but the rear end drifted six inches wide on the gravel transition and he clipped a cone.
“That was close,” Noah said encouragingly. “That was really close. And you only got one cone.”
From outside, Walter’s voice floated up: “Twenty-seven!”
Gray pulled the engine forward and stopped. He sat with his hands on the wheel and breathed.
He would come back tomorrow and try again.
And the day after that. And every day after that until he got it right.
The town needed at least one person who could drive the fire truck.
If, God forbid, a fire broke out nobody could get the engine with its hoses and 1500 gallons of water to the blaze, people could die.
He had to keep trying. It was as simple as that.
He was aware, distantly, that his refusal to quit was about more than the fire engine.
Somewhere beneath the cones and math and determination not to be bested by a machine was an understanding that went all the way to his bones.
He knew what it meant when people walked away from things that were hard.
He wasn’t that man. He would never be that man.
Bonnie arrived at four-fifteen to collect the kids.
She found Noah in the passenger seat of the fire engine offering a running commentary that Gray appeared to be enduring with long-suffering patience of a minor saint. Cassidy was sitting by the station door with a clipboard, marking on it each time a cone went down.
Walter Meeks and two of the other pinochle regulars were arrayed along the sidewalk with the attentive posture of spectators at a sporting event. She overheard Ruth’s voice from somewhere behind her: “That’s twenty-nine. I’ve got thirty in the pool for the week. Come on, Grayson.”
Bonnie leaned against her car and watched.