Chapter 21
Easton
I'd unpacked one box in four days.
The brass lamp from my grandmother's living room sat on a nightstand in a room she'd never seen, and that was the part of the apartment that looked like somebody lived in it. The rest of the boxes were stacked flat against the wall in the hallway, taped at the bottom, ready.
I'd been up since five-thirty without the alarm going off. Hartsdale's gray had river in it. Queens' gray had the highway, and I'd already learned the difference.
I made the coffee. I drank it standing at the counter. There was no dog on the kitchen tile and no second pour for anyone, and the knowing didn't fix it.
I put the mug in the sink. I put my boots on. I walked the four blocks to 295.
I'd walked into the bay at 295 a thousand times.
Twice as a probie. More times than I could count when I'd been on the line.
The smell hit me first: diesel and old coffee, the fluorescent buzz over the apparatus floor, the wet shine on the rig from somebody's morning wash.
My body remembered it before my head did.
Two and a half years. I'd been away from the smell of this house for two and a half years.
Walker's locker was at the end of the second row. Mine, now. Somebody had put a piece of masking tape across the front with FORD written on it in the same Sharpie that had been in the kitchen drawer eight years ago. I knew because Walker's name was still under it, slightly visible through the tape.
"Ford."
I looked up.
Brian Torres was halfway across the bay with his gear bag over his shoulder and a grin coming up on his face that wasn't going to be denied. He was on the back end of A-shift. He should have been heading home. He wasn't. He was crossing the bay to me.
I dropped my bag.
"Torres."
He hit me at the lockers with the brief firehouse hug men used at firehouses, two-fisted at the back. He stepped back and looked me over.
"Look who finally remembered the way."
"How you been, brother?"
"I've been good. When'd you get in?"
"Tuesday."
"Tuesday. And you didn't call?"
"I was gonna call."
"Were you, though?"
He was watching my face the way a man who'd known me a long time watched my face when I'd been gone too long. He clocked something. He didn't push.
"How was Hartsdale at the end?"
"Closed her up clean."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Mhm."
That was as far as he was going to take it. He shifted the gear bag on his shoulder.
"Ava's been on me all week about Sunday. Lasagna. Bring nothin'."
"Brian."
"Don't say no. You haven't seen Sofia in two and a half years. She's nine. She has the vocabulary of a federal prosecutor. Last week, she told me my argument lacked merit. She was correct."
I laughed before I meant to. The Queens came up in it, the way it did when I was off-guard. Brian caught it, too. His grin widened.
"How's Ava?"
"Pregnant."
I looked at him.
"Yeah."
"Brian."
"Boy this time. Twenty weeks on Tuesday."
"Brother."
"Thank Christ." He shifted the bag again. "I needed an ally in that house. Sofia and Ava tag-team me. They take notes. They compare notes. I lose every argument by lunch, and the only reason I get to vote is they let me think I'm voting."
"And in twenty weeks, you've got somebody on your side."
"In twenty weeks. I do. I'm countin' the hours."
He grinned at me. I grinned back. It was the closest I'd come to feeling something I recognized since I'd crossed the bridge.
Then Garrett came through.
He had his gear bag over one shoulder and his coat over the other arm. He saw me from the entry. He set the bag down. He crossed the bay at the pace Garrett had always crossed a bay, which was the pace of a man who didn't waste any motion.
"Ford."
"Stone."
We shook hands. He held it a beat longer than he'd held the hands of the other men in the bay this morning. That was as much affection as Garrett gave at the lockers, and I'd known him long enough to know it counted as a lot.
"How long you been back?"
"Tuesday."
"You unpack?"
"One box."
His mouth did the small, almost-smile he didn't give away. "Sounds about right."
"How's Sloane?"
"Working too hard. She's good. Said to say hi if I saw you." He shrugged. "I saw you."
"How's Theo?"
"He's seven. He lost both front teeth in the same week. He looks like a hockey enforcer in a Spider-Man T-shirt."
"He still on the bike?"
"He's on his second bike. He outgrew the first one in nine months."
"Sounds about right."
He stood there a beat. He took me in the way Garrett took in a thing he was running scenarios on. Nobody else in the bay was looking at me that way. I felt the look land.
He didn't ask.
He didn't have to.
Garrett Stone had spent eight years apart from the only woman he'd ever loved because they'd both thought it was for the best. He knew the inside of what I was carrying.
He wasn't going to say a word about it.
He nodded once and picked his gear bag up. On his way past me to the kitchen door, he set his hand on my shoulder for the count of one. Then he was through.
Brian was already calling the probie across the bay about something I didn't catch. I picked my bag up off the floor.
I'd been at 295 for eleven minutes.
The kitchen hadn't changed. Same counter. Same coffee pot, or a replacement for the same pot. Somebody had put a fresh one on for the change.
Shane was at the island.
He was in the captain's blue uniform shirt I hadn't seen on him before. The badge was new. The lieutenant's bars he'd worn for the four years I'd been on his line in this house were gone. A captain's double bar sat in their place. He looked like the rank had always been there.
He set his coffee down when he saw me come in.
"Brother."
"Captain."
His face scrunched up.
"Don't."
"Briggs."
"Better."
He came around the island and pulled me into the back-slap version of a hug that men did when they'd been waiting on a man to walk through a door for two and a half years. He held it a beat longer than I expected. He stepped back.
"You made the bridge."
"I made the bridge."
"Tuesday."
"Tuesday."
"You been eatin'?"
"I been eatin'."
"Mhm." He turned to the counter. "Coffee."
He poured me a cup and handed it to me. He'd remembered the cream and the one sugar, the way he'd remembered for four years before I'd left.
"Crew's in the bay," he said. "I'll walk you through. Then you get the morning check."
"Yeah."
"You alright, Ford?"
"I'm alright."
"Ford."
"I'm alright, Shane."
He looked at me for a beat. The look was not Garrett's look. Shane wasn't running scenarios. Shane was asking. He had been my friend long enough that I owed him better than the version I'd given him.
I let some of it out.
"Ask me again in a month."
He nodded once.
"Alright."
He didn't push.
We did the walk-through.
The lieutenant was a woman I hadn't met. She was in her mid-forties, short hair. She shook my hand and told me Shane talked about me too much. The senior man on the engine clapped me on the shoulder and said welcome back. The probie was nineteen. He called me sir twice in the first thirty seconds.
"Don't call me sir."
"Yes, sir."
"Brother."
"Yes, sir."
The lieutenant laughed.
I did the morning check on the engine compartment because I'd done the morning check on every engine compartment of every shift of every house I'd worked at, and I wasn't going to stop now. Things were either on the rig or they weren't. I preferred to confirm it myself.
The tones dropped at nine-forty.
The dispatcher's voice came clean over the bay speakers. Structure fire, three-story walk-up, smoke visible from the second floor. Two and a half years away from the tones in this house, and my body found the gear without consulting me.
Boots. Turnout pants. Suspenders. Coat. Helmet. Gloves in the pocket because I'd grab them in the rig.
I was in the jump seat with the door closing before I'd had a conversation with myself about whether I was ready.
Shane was in the officer's seat now.
That was the difference.
We rolled.
The call ran how mid-tier calls ran. The smoke was the gray and lazy kind, which meant the fire was contained and venting.
The front door was unlocked. I went up the stairwell behind the senior man with the line on my shoulder, and we found the fire in a back bedroom that had started in an extension cord and gotten as far as the curtains and the bedside table.
We knocked it down in under five minutes.
Nobody was home. The whole call ran thirty-eight minutes from tones to back-in-quarters.
I'd run a hundred calls like it.
The crew moved around me the way I'd been wanting a crew to move around me since I'd left for Hartsdale. When we stripped down in the bay, the senior man punched my shoulder once and told me it was good to have me back.
I told him it was good to be back.
I meant it.
It still didn't reach the place I'd been waiting for it to reach.
I got off shift the next morning at eight and walked.
Queens at this hour had a smell to it. Diesel, bakery exhaust, old rain on warm asphalt. The old man behind the counter at the second-block bodega lifted his hand at me when I went past. He didn't know I'd been gone for two and a half years.
I got to the apartment. Started the coffee maker. Stood at the counter while it ran. The brass lamp was the only thing in the place that didn't look like a sublet.
The phone was on the counter.
I picked it up. Opened the thread.
The last message.
Astrid
Locked.
From the Saturday before. We'd ended every night for a month with that exchange—me on her porch in the dark, her on the other side of the door, the deadbolt sliding before I'd made the front walk.
I looked at the word.
I didn't type. I didn't delete.
I set the phone face down on the counter and slid it to the far end.
She'd told me she wasn't ready. She'd told me to take the slot.
She'd kissed me on the curb of Maple Avenue and told me to do great things.
She'd meant two of those three things. The third was the only door on her that would close.
I'd let her close it, because the alternative was overriding a woman who'd spent six years calibrating around a man who'd overridden her.
I wasn't going to be that.
I'd come to Queens because she'd asked me to.
The rest of it was me keeping my end. I was going to miss her every morning I woke up in a city that wasn't hers and every night I came home to an apartment she'd never seen, and I wasn't going to lie about either one to a single man in this lifetime, including myself.
The coffee maker made its small final sound.
I poured the cup I wasn't going to drink.
I drank it anyway.