COOL UNDER FIRE

Chapter 1 The Woman Who Apologizes to Doors

In my defense, it swung back and got me on the elbow, and a lifetime of manners is a lifetime of manners, and also — this is the part that matters, the part I have spent three years in Halford, Ohio building brick by nervous brick — it is exactly the kind of thing the woman I am supposed to be would do.

Birdie Vance apologizes to doors. Birdie Vance jumps when the toaster is louder than she expected.

Birdie Vance once shrieked at a wasp so memorably in the seasonal aisle that Marcy still does the impression at parties.

That woman is a documented town treasure, the jumpiest soul in Halford County, and I have worked very hard to be her, because she is the opposite, in every visible particular, of who I used to be.

I got the coffee going and dropped the scoop and said sorry to the floor. See? It comes free now. That’s how you know a disguise is working — when it stops being a costume and starts being your hands.

The morning did its small-town thing outside the kitchen window: Mr. Petrakis walking his ancient beagle, the Flats waking up in that soft gray river light, the smell of somebody’s bacon two houses down.

I live in the top half of a two-flat on Larch Street in the neighborhood everyone calls the Flats, the low blocks by the old harbor where the rent is honest and the porches are close enough to argue across, and I love it with a fierceness that would probably alarm my neighbors if I ever let it show, which I don’t, because fierce is not on Birdie’s résumé.

I want to walk you through my morning, because a lot happened in it that nobody watching me would have counted as anything at all.

I made coffee and did not think about the eleven things I noticed while making it, because noticing is a reflex I retired, or told everyone I retired.

I heard Ren’s boy Theo thundering down the stairs of the bottom flat like a bag of hammers and I did not flinch, though I let my shoulders do a little jump for the benefit of no one.

I walked to work the long way, which is a habit I call “getting my steps” and which is actually something with a longer name I don’t use anymore, the kind where you clock the parked cars that are new and the ones that are gone and the delivery van that’s been on the block one day too many.

I did all of that the way you keep flossing after the dentist stops checking.

Old training doesn’t leave. It just goes quiet and waits to be embarrassing.

And then, two blocks in, on the corner of Larch and Delaney, I smelled it, and everything in me that I keep in a locked box stood straight up at once.

Smoke. Fine. Somebody’s kitchen, you’d think, and the three people on the sidewalk did think that, because they kept walking.

But this smoke was wrong. There was a sweetness under it that does not come off a pan of eggs, a chemical high note that my whole body had an opinion about before my brain caught up, and I stopped on the sidewalk with my heart going and I thought, in a voice that is not Birdie’s voice at all, flat and clean and very far away: that’s an accelerant, that’s not a kitchen, somebody set that.

Then the fire trucks were coming, and Birdie came back into my body like air into a room, and I put my hand to my chest and said “oh my gosh, oh my gosh” to the woman next to me, and backed us both up onto the far curb, and fussed, and was useless and sweet and jumpy, exactly as advertised.

Nobody counts the careful thing when it’s wearing a scared face. That’s the entire principle my life is built on.

I went to work. I said sorry to the bell over the door. And I told myself, every single day, that the smell on Larch and Delaney was somebody else’s problem, that I was done being the person who walks toward the thing everyone else runs from, that I had earned my quiet and I was going to keep it.

I believed it for almost a week. That might be a personal record.