Chapter 6
Burned
Autumn
My jaw dropped before my mind caught up.
I didn’t understand the delay. I didn’t understand how we could put it off for a time when all of the details had already been worked out.
The craftsman creating our wedding altar had just sent me a digital mockup before he started carving the wood.
Doves were going to be released after Ray kissed me under it.
My grandma was traveling six-hundred miles in the heat of the late summer sun by Greyhound bus, because she was afraid of flying, to be at the wedding.
We couldn’t put the wedding off. Grandma had already bought her bus ticket.
“But—” I started to say, before I thought it through.
“For how long? Grandma is going through a lot to get there, and...” I trailed off, suddenly realizing “calling off” was much different than “putting off.” A delay was different from cancelling.
Still, my mind considered he was going through something so intense, that calling it off must have been the only option.
And in this option, we were still together.
The wedding just wasn’t happening like we had wanted.
Like I had planned. This must have been some emergency.
Turned out, the emergency was that he met someone else.
Her name was Suzie, like some 1950s spunky waitress that wore polka-dots and danced the Jitterbug.
The images of this woman ran rampant in my mind, her laughing at his ill-timed jokes.
Her pulling a brisket out of the oven whilst wearing a frilly apron.
I didn’t know why I thought of her in this vintage lens.
Perhaps, it was easier than imagining he had chosen someone else in my realm.
Though he vehemently denied cheating on me, he professed that he and Suzie were soulmates.
The star-crossed lovers met in school. She wanted to be an anesthesiologist. He wanted to be a surgeon.
How cute. A real power couple. I couldn’t hear the rest of the ways they went together through my ugly crying.
I didn’t want this to be real. When Ray was finally done explaining why he needed to be with Suzie, instead of me, he said one tight-lipped apology.
“I’m sorry we weren’t meant to be,” as he walked away.
And just like that, eighteen months down the drain.
I wondered if he’d already told his family.
I wondered if they had already cancelled the wedding things that they had organized.
Part of me wanted to call them and see if they knew what their son had just done.
I wondered if they were relieved that he was marrying someone more of his caliber.
Someone who could pull her own weight. Yes, there was a part of me that wanted to call.
That wanted to know… while the other part of me wanted to never speak to anyone I knew ever again, and that's how I got to where I am right now.
*****
I did what anyone in my newly single, jobless, and borderline state of total shock would do: I called the phone number on the ad for the Maple Haven Fire District.
I talked to someone, while trying not to divulge the mental state I was in, in fear of being deemed incapable of making such a decision.
Incapable of choosing to flee from everything and everyone I knew until there was no more fire threat.
In this drought, it could last forever, I supposed.
Taking a full page of notes, I learned everything I needed to know about it.
They were eager to fill the position, and I was eager to jump ship.
All I needed to do was have a one-on-one training session, but luckily for me, they were able to set that up for me immediately.
First thing on Monday morning, I would learn all that I needed to know about being a firewatcher in a remote tower that overlooked the landscape, and then that night, I would be sleeping in a tower.
I was basically Rapunzel, except my hair went to the middle of my back, and for that, I was happy.
I’d shave my head before allowing Ray to use it as a rope.
Now, I supposed the furlough of my job was the least of my worries, considering how quickly I was able to obtain gainful employment, but my last day at work, on a Friday, which usually brought in dozens of volunteers for various efforts, was especially hard.
Everyone thought I’d lost my mind for taking this job. But they weren’t me.
Even before I was dumped, the hot words like, “solitude” and “peacefulness” appealed to my soul in a way that I couldn’t explain.
Those were two things that I had found a great need for in my life lately.
And maybe now, a break from my church family who were trying to convince me otherwise would be a blessing.
Being a seasonal firewatcher in a high tower in the middle of the wilderness in Wyoming might have been something that I would get bored of, sure.
But I would see it through, no matter what.
I was the kind of person who stuck it out when things got hard. I didn’t just give up and run.
Had I lost my mind? Truthfully, I couldn’t tell anymore. I was in no position to tell where my mind was anymore after being dumped so close to the wedding.
Well-meaning people treated it like I had accidentally spilled fruit punch onto a pair of white pants at a Labor Day lake house barbeque.
The faux-pas of the year meeting a nearly violent end.
They expected me to laugh, feel a little embarrassed, grieve for a seemingly fitting thirty-seconds, and move on.
But until they’d been dumped mere weeks from their meticulously planned wedding and had to make all of the phone calls to the venues, the vendors, and send out smoke signals to everyone their mother made them invite, including my nosey cousin Becky who replied with a peppering of questions more intense than the FBI, they didn’t get to tell me how to feel.
Becky was only feeling extra confident because of her recent relationship development.
She’d started dating a guy, whom I didn’t know or care about, but she’d made sure she “accidentally” sent a picture of them to me shortly after she heard the news from her mother, my mother’s sister, about my broken engagement.
“Oops,” she said in a text, moments after I received a photo of a pair of hands holding. “I meant to send that to Adam, not Autumn. Silly me.” Right, I thought to myself.