Grumpy Firefighter (Copper Creek Firehouse #2)

1. Maya

MAYA

My most challenging patient of the week so far is a seventy-three-year-old man named Gerald, and the bar Gerald has set is genuinely not that high.

He has a torn rotator cuff, blood pressure that makes my supervisor wince when she reads his chart, and the hearing aids his daughter bought him for Christmas sitting unused in a drawer at home. Because, in Gerald's words, they make him feel old.

Gerald is seventy-three.

"Okay, Gerald." I position myself directly in front of him so he can see my face. "I need you to raise your left arm out to the side. Slowly. Just to here."

I demonstrate, lifting my own arm to shoulder height.

Gerald watches me carefully.

"You want me to raise a beer?" he says.

"Your arm, Gerald," I say, in a slightly louder voice. "I want you to raise you arm."

"Ah." He considers this. "Which shoulder?"

"Your left one," I say. "The injured one."

"Oh, the left one," Gerald says.

And then, after a moment's consideration, he starts to raise it.

Slowly.

More slowly than I think is strictly necessary. But he gets there.

I watch his movement.

The slight compensation through the neck, the shoulder tracking a little high, the wince on his face as he lifts it higher.

"Very good," I say. "Now back down again, please."

By the time Gerald shuffles out I've got about seven minutes before my next appointment.

He made it through two of his six exercises, told me at some length about his grandchildren, and their love for TikTok.

Gave me his views on the state of the floor coverings and carpet industry in the greater Copper Creek area, which is the industry he'd worked in since he was old enough to go to work.

And managed to mishear the word "rotation" as something I'm fairly sure isn't a word at all.

I sit down and squeeze the bridge of my nose with my fingers.

I stare at the ceiling for a while and try not to reconsider my life choices.

I've wanted to be a physiotherapist since I was twelve years old. But like a lot of things in life, the reality doesn't quite live up to the brochure.

In the brochure, there's a grateful patient with a sports injury, doing his exercises with quiet determination while inspirational music plays.

In reality there's Gerald telling me about imported Chinese carpets and mishearing everything I say because he won't wear his hearing aids.

Which is fine.

It's fine.

I love this job. I just maybe pictured it a little differently.

That's all.

I let my eyes close for a second. Just to let everything settle behind them.

But just as I start to relax, there a knock at the door.

My eyes snap open.

There's a man standing in the doorway, one hand still raised from knocking.

"Sorry," he says. "Was I interrupting something?"

"No." I sit up too fast and straighten a stack of papers that didn't need straightening. "No, it's fine. Come in."

I am the picture of a competent medical professional. I am not at all a woman who was caught with her eyes shut at two in the afternoon.

"You must be Cole," I say, looking at the referral on my desk.

He steps inside, and the room gets smaller.

That's the first thing I notice.

The second thing I notice is that he has to dip his head, just slightly, coming through the door, and I don't think he even registers doing it.

Like a man who's spent his whole life being a size that doors weren't built for.

He's handsome, too.

And not in a way he's doing anything about.

In a quiet, strong, formidable kind of way. With a jaw you could set a level against and a mouth that looks like it hasn't agreed to anything in years.

I look back down at the referral. Because that is the professional thing to do, and also because looking at it is easier than looking at him.

"So," I say, scanning the page. "Cole Brennan. Firefighter."

"Yeah."

"Says here you were injured on the job." I find the line. "Shoulder and lower back. There was an accident?"

"Yeah."

I wait for more. But he just looks out the window silently. Staring off into the distance.

"A structure collapse," I read, since he's clearly not going to walk me through it. "That sounds serious."

"Yup," he says.

"It says you were hospitalized."

"Yes, ma'am."

I glance up and notice he's still standing.

"You can sit, you know," I say, and nod at the chair across from my desk.

He looks at the chair like it's said something to him.

Then he sits.

Sort of.

He lowers himself into it the way you'd set down a piano you didn't quite trust the legs of. One hand braced on the armrest and taking more weight than one hand should.

His back stays very straight the whole way down, but he doesn't make a sound.

Which is unusual.

People normally make a sound.

There's a grunt, or a hiss through the teeth, or one of those involuntary old-man oofs that even twenty-year-olds make when they think nobody's listening.

A man the size of a doorframe folds a bad shoulder and an injured back into a chair eight inches too small for him and gives me absolutely nothing.

Interesting.

"Okay." I roll my stool around the desk so I am sitting right in front of him and pick up my pen. "I'm going to ask you to move a few things for me. Nothing dramatic. I just want to see what the shoulder and the back are willing to give me today. Tell me the second anything hurts."

"It's fine."

"That's not one of the options I'm offering," I say.

Something flickers across his face.

Not amusement, exactly. More like the faint surprise of a man who expected this to go more smoothly.

"Left arm first," I say. "Out to the side. Slow. Just to where it stops being comfortable, then stop."

He raises it.

Smooth.

Even.

No hitch, no wince, all the way up to shoulder height like he's doing it to prove a point.

Except this is the entire thing I do for a living. The thing I've been training for years to be good at.

So I catch it.

Not in the arm, but in his face.

A muscle along his jaw goes tight for half a second, and his breath leaves slow and careful through his nose.

The corner of his eye creases before he smooths the whole thing flat again.

He's good.

Genuinely good at this.

If I were across the room instead of close enough to read the stitching on his collar, I'd have missed it.

"And how was that?" I say.

"Fine, he says.

"On a scale of one to ten."

"Two," he says.

It's a six.

Maybe a seven.

I write minimizes pain on the chart, which is the polite clinical way of saying this is a man who'd report a broken arm as a slightly stiff wrist, and only then if I found the loose end of it on the floor first.

And that, more or less, is how the next forty-five minutes go.

I take him through everything. Range of motion, active and then passive, the joint moved by my hands instead of his.

Resisted tests for each rotator cuff muscle in turn.

Strength grading, one side against the other.

The functional stuff at the end, the reaching and twisting and lifting overhead that his job actually asks of him a hundred times a shift.

He does all of it.

And he gives me nothing.

"Push against my hand," I say.

He pushes against my hand. My hand goes nowhere. I make a note.

"And the other side."

He does the other side. My hand goes nowhere again. I make another note.

"Does that one hurt?" I say.

"No."

It does.

I have my fingers on the muscle while he says it and I can feel the small thing his face refuses to do.

So I write down what I feel instead of what he tells me. One of those two things is true and it isn't the one coming out of his mouth.

Then we get to the part I can't do through a shirt.

"I'm going to need to actually see the shoulder move," I say, in the flat, brisk, this-is-the-most-ordinary-sentence-in-the-world voice I spent six years of training learning to produce on command. "So if you could take your top off for me."

He doesn't make it strange. I'll give him that.

He just reaches back over the shoulder that works, takes a fistful of the collar, and pulls the whole thing off over his head in one motion.

The way men do when their own body has never once been a thing they've had to think about.

And.

Okay.

I have a master's degree. I have dissected a shoulder.

I can name every muscle in front of me in Latin, and I do, internally, at speed, because naming things is what I do when I need somewhere to put my attention that isn't where it would otherwise go.

Deltoid. Trapezius. Pectoralis major.

There is, I note, a great deal of him.

Clinically.

That's a clinical observation.

The man is built on a different scale to the people I usually lay hands on, and not the gym kind.

Not the kind that's there for anyone to look at.

The kind the work makes.

Years of ladders and hoses and carrying people out of places nobody should have to be carried out of, quietly turning him into this.

None of it is decoration. All of it is load-bearing.

I am a professional, I remind myself. Still quietly naming the parts of his shoulder in my head.

I locate the supraspinatus.

Then he turns so I can see the back of the shoulder, and I briefly forget the supraspinatus exists.

His back is a record of the job. Covered in scars.

Old ones gone silver and soft at the edges, newer ones still pink, and one long mean one running up under the shoulder blade that I do not ask about, because it is none of my business and because I'm not certain my voice would come out level if I tried.

I have seen scars before.

This is a clinic. People arrive damaged.

That's the whole premise of the room.

But, I have not, until today, had to remind myself in so many words to keep breathing while I take a history.

"Lift it again for me," I say. "Slow. I just want to watch how it tracks this time."

He lifts.

And I watch the shoulder blade slide, watch the catch arrive exactly where I knew it would, watch the three other muscles step in to do the job the hurt one won't.

I watch all of it with the focus I've spent years building, and the whole way through he gives me the same flat, faraway patience, like a man waiting out a long red light.

Going through the motions.

Hiding what it costs him.

Counting, I'm fairly sure, the minutes until he can put his shirt back on and leave.

I put the pen down and roll the stool back around so I'm in front of him again.

Face to face.

The way I was with Gerald, except at least Gerald was trying. In his own way.

"Okay. Here's where we're at." I wait until he's more or less looking at me.

"Your shoulder and your back are both hurt, and they're hurt in a way that's going to take real work to come back from.

But they will come back. Nothing I've seen today is permanent.

Nothing here is the kind of thing you don't recover from. "

He says nothing. Which, at this point, I'm choosing to read as encouragement.

"What I need you to understand is that recovery isn't something that happens to you.

It's something you do. The exercises, the load work, all of it.

What you put in is what you get back. If you put in nothing—" I stop, and start again, gentler.

"If you do half of it, you get half a shoulder.

And half a shoulder, in your line of work, isn't a small thing. "

He's still not looking at me, but I keep going anyway.

"You don't get to be a firefighter with a shoulder that gives out when you reach overhead.

You don't get to carry someone down a ladder on a back that locks up on you halfway.

If this doesn't heal properly, it's not just pain you live with.

It's the job. It's whether you can do the job at all.

" I let that sit a second. "That's what's actually on the table here.

Not whether your arm aches in the mornings.

Whether you get to keep being the thing you are. "

I mean it.

I mean every word of it, and I say it the way you say the thing that actually matters, slow and level, so it lands.

He looks up.

Not at me. But, at the clock on the wall behind my head.

"Are we done?" he says. "Can I go now?"

And that's it.

That's all he says.

I turn and look at the clock too, because apparently that's what we're doing now.

It's three minutes past. The session is, technically, over.

"Yeah," I say. "We're done."

I don't have the energy to make it sound like anything other than what it is.

"Same time next week," I say. "Try to do the exercises before then. Or don't. It's your shoulder."

He stands, pulls his shirt back on over his head, and walks out the room without giving me another glance.

I go back to squeezing the bridge of my nose with my eyes shut. Trying not to wish I was somewhere else.