Chapter Nine
Zoe
The next time I go to the station I bring cookies and a bucket.
Not at the same time. The cookies come first. Same recipe, same walk down Haverford. Torres is in the bay when I arrive, and she sees me coming from half a block away and calls inside without looking.
“Cookie girl’s back.”
“I have a name.”
“You have cookies. That’s better than a name.” She takes the container from me and opens it and nods with the solemnity of a judge at a baking competition. “Still good. Consistent. That’s important.”
“Is the captain in?”
“She’s on a call. Sit.” Torres points to the folding chair by the side entrance, the one that’s always there, the one someone clearly uses during downtime. I sit. Torres leans against the engine and eats a cookie and watches me with that assessing look I’m starting to think is just her face.
A woman I haven’t met comes out of the kitchen carrying a plate. Tall, athletic, dark hair in a braid. She stops when she sees me and looks at Torres.
“This her?”
“This is her.”
“Huh.” She looks at me. “I’m Rivera.”
“Zoe.”
“I know. Torres has a running bet with Walsh about how many weeks you last.” Rivera glances at Torres, who doesn’t deny it. “I took the over. Don’t let me down.”
“What’s the over?”
“Five weeks.”
“I only have three.”
“Then you better be efficient.” Rivera takes a cookie from the Tupperware, bites it, and walks back inside.
I sit in the folding chair and wait. The bay smells clean, diesel and soap, and the engine gleams in the mid-morning light.
I can hear voices inside, the ambient sound of a station between calls.
Someone laughing. A cabinet closing. The low murmur of a radio on the dispatch channel, steady and constant, like a heartbeat.
A woman appears in the doorway. Older, calm, watchful. She doesn’t introduce herself. She just stands there and looks at me for a long moment, and then she says, “You’re the one who told Cap she’s not a kid.”
“I said I’m not a kid. I said I’m a firefighter.”
“Same thing to her.” The woman crosses her arms. She’s got a stillness about her that’s different from Torres’s busy energy or Rivera’s sharpness. She looks like someone who’s been here a long time and plans to be here longer. “I’m Hayes.”
Nora Hayes. I know the name from the department registry and from an article about Station 11’s rescue operations. She’s been on Cap’s crew for years. If Torres is the engine, Hayes is the frame.
“How long have you been at 11?” I ask.
“Long enough to know Cap doesn’t change her mind because someone asks nicely.” Hayes unfolds her arms. “She changes her mind when the evidence changes.”
“What evidence?”
“That’s for you to figure out.” She looks at me, and there’s nothing unkind in it but nothing soft either. “Cookies are nice. But cookies aren’t evidence.”
She goes back inside. I sit in the folding chair and think about that.
Cookies aren’t evidence.
I look at the engine. At the bay. At the hoses coiled on their hooks and the tools organized on the wall and the whiteboard with the shift schedule in neat handwriting. Everything in this station is maintained, cared for, kept in working order. That’s not an accident. That’s a standard.
I stand up. Walk to the corner of the bay where the supply shelf is. There’s a bucket, a sponge, and a bottle of soap on the lower shelf, the kind you use on equipment.
I fill the bucket at the utility sink. Add soap. Carry it to the engine.
I start washing the rig.
Nobody told me to. Nobody asked me to. Torres is inside and Hayes is inside and Rivera is probably collecting on a side bet I don’t know about, and I’m alone in the bay with a sponge and a bucket of soapy water and the most beautiful fire engine I’ve ever seen.
I start with the bumper. Chrome, heavy, already clean but not as clean as I can make it.
I work the sponge into the seams, around the bolts, into the corners where soap and water do what they do.
The chrome starts to shine harder. I move to the body panels, working in long strokes, rinsing the sponge, going back over spots I missed.
It takes forty-five minutes. The body. The wheel wells. The running boards. The light housings. I’m soaked from the elbows down and my sneakers are wet and the engine is dripping and gleaming when Torres comes back out.
She stops. Looks at the engine. Looks at me. Looks at the engine again.
“Did you wash my rig?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t ask you to wash my rig.”
“I know.”
Torres walks around the engine. Slowly. Checking. She runs her hand along the body panel near the front wheel, where I spent extra time on a spot that had something dried and stubborn stuck to it.
“You got the tar off the panel,” she says.
“I used some elbow grease.”
“That tar’s been there for a week. I was going to hit it on Friday.
” Torres looks at me. The expression on her face is different from anything I’ve seen there before.
Not amused. Not assessing. Closer to respect, which from Torres feels like being handed a medal.
“You do equipment maintenance at the academy?”
“Top of my class in equipment checks.”
“Of course you were.” She shakes her head. Then she pulls out her phone and types something. I’m pretty sure it’s the group chat.
Cap appears five minutes later. She walks into the bay with her coffee and stops and looks at the engine, which is cleaner than it’s been since the department painted it.
“Who did this?”
“I did,” I say. “The bucket and soap were right there. I had time.”
Cap looks at me. Then at Torres. Then back at me.
“Kimball.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You can’t just wash the rig.”
“With respect, Captain, I already did.”
Walsh’s voice comes from somewhere inside the station: “She’s got you there, Cap.”
Cap closes her eyes for exactly one second.
When she opens them, she looks at me with an expression I haven’t seen before.
It’s not a yes. It’s not a no. It’s the expression of a woman who is running out of ways to deal with me and is mildly annoyed to discover she doesn’t entirely hate the problem.
“My answer hasn’t changed,” she says.
She told me that last time too.
“Stop washing things.”
“No, ma’am.”
She turns and walks back inside. Torres watches her go, then looks at me.
“Hayes talked to you.”
“She said cookies aren’t evidence.”
“She’s right.” Torres takes the last cookie from the Tupperware, which she’s been holding this entire time. “But this helped. The rig thing. Cap notices effort.”
“She didn’t seem impressed.”
“Cap never seems impressed. That’s her whole thing.” Torres bites the cookie. “Same time next week?”
“I’ll be here.”
“Bring more cookies. And don’t wash anything without asking first. If you touch the hoses Liz will have your head.”
“Who’s Liz?”
“Liz doesn’t work here. She just has opinions about hoses.” Torres waves her hand. “Long story. Go home.”
I go home.
* * *
Mom made her chicken, her favorite thing to make anytime. It's practically her comfort food. It’s on the table when I walk in, along with rice and collard greens and the good plates, which means we’re having a family dinner and I’m expected to be present in body and spirit and gratitude.
Dad says grace. He always says grace. Even when we’re eating pizza on a Friday, he bows his head and thanks God for the food and the family and the blessings we don’t see, and he means every word of it because my dad is a man who does not say things he doesn’t mean.
He got that from his mother, who got it from hers, and somewhere in the lineage of Kimball integrity there’s a gene I’m missing because I’ve been lying to both of them for a week and a half.
“How’s the gym?” Mom asks.
“Good.”
“You’re going a lot.”
“I need to stay in shape for the job.”
“Speaking of which.” Dad sets down his fork.
He does this when he’s about to say something he’s been thinking about, the fork placement, like he needs both hands free for the weight of his words.
“I talked to Gerald at church. His son-in-law is at Station 24. Says it’s a good house.
Good guys. They do community outreach on the weekends. ”
“That’s great.”
“He said Medina’s solid. Fair. Runs a clean operation.” Dad picks up his fork again. Subject delivered. “You’ll be fine.”
“I know I’ll be fine.”
Mom looks at me. She’s got the look. The one that says she can hear what I’m not saying and she’s choosing not to press it yet but the choice is costing her something.
“Baby, are you excited?” she asks. “About starting?”
“Of course.”
“Because you seem a little…” She waves her fork in a circle, searching for the word. “Unsettled.”
“I’m not unsettled. I’m just adjusting.”
“Adjusting to what? You haven’t started yet.”
I push a piece of chicken around my plate.
The collard greens are perfect, cooked low and slow with smoked turkey necks like Grandma Eloise taught her.
Everything in this house is inherited. The recipes, the grace, the expectation that you accept what you’re given and you’re grateful and you don’t make a fuss.
“I just want to do a good job,” I say. “Wherever I end up.”
“You’ll do a wonderful job.” Mom reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “Station 24 is lucky to have you.”
Dad nods. Conversation over. The system worked.
The machine produced a result and the result has a number and I should be grateful and I am grateful and I’m also sitting at this table with soapy water still under my fingernails from washing a fire engine that doesn’t belong to me at a station that won’t have me.
After dinner I do the dishes. Mom dries.
We stand side by side at the sink the way we’ve done since I was tall enough to reach the faucet, and she hums a song I recognize from church, something about walking through the valley and fearing no evil, and I want to tell her everything.
I want to tell her about Station 11 and the cookies and Torres and Hayes and the rig and Captain Donnelly’s face when she saw the chrome gleaming.
I want to tell her about Anthem and the music and the bartender with the pink mohawk who gave me a Shirley Temple instead of letting me get drunk off my ass.
I want to tell her that I’m not ungrateful, I’m just twenty-two and I know what I want and nobody will let me have it and I'm so tired of being called a kid and being treated like one.
But Mom is humming and the dishes are warm and the kitchen smells like collard greens and candle wax, and some things you don’t say out loud because saying them would change the shape of the room you’re standing in, and I’m not ready to change this room yet.
I dry my hands. Kiss her cheek. Go upstairs.
The glow-in-the-dark stars are waiting. I text Teague.
washed a fire engine today. unsupervised. possibly illegal. definitely satisfying.
She responds in two minutes.
breaking and entering a fire station is a bold move for someone who wants to work there
i didn’t break in. the door was open.
the punk community would be proud. unauthorized cleaning is a form of protest.
I laugh into my pillow so Mom doesn’t hear.
Then I put on the Pretenders, quiet, through my earbuds, and I lie there and listen to Chrissie Hynde sing about going back to Ohio and I think about the bay and the chrome and Hayes saying cookies aren’t evidence and Cap’s face doing that thing it does where nothing moves but everything shifts.
Two weeks left. The clock is running. Medina is waiting on Greystone Road and I’ve never been to Greystone Road and I’m running out of days to fix this.
But the tar is off the panel. Torres noticed. And Cap didn’t say stop coming back. She said stop washing things, which is different, and I’m learning the difference between what Captain Donnelly says and what she means.
They’re two different languages. I’m going to learn both. And then I'm going to work there and show her she made the right choice in not sending me away.