It’s Extremely Romantic, and I Won’t Hear Otherwise #2
"The cookies are homemade," she added. "The snickerdoodles are exceptional, if I do say so myself."
A long beat passed. Miller reached out and took the bag. Looked inside. Looked at Vera. Looked back inside.
"Looks good," he said.
From Miller, this was a standing ovation.
Captain Rodriguez emerged from his office with the restrained pace of a man who had been running fire operations for twenty years and had never once been hurried by anything short of an actual fire. He looked at Vera. Vera looked at him.
"Captain Rodriguez," I said.
He put out his hand. She shook it. He had the grip of someone who could snap a hose coupling by hand. She didn't flinch. I noted this with private, disproportionate pride.
"You're the librarian," he said.
"I am."
"Alves talks about you."
"I do not—" I started.
"She does," Stevens confirmed from across the bay. "Constantly."
"Every shift," Jackson added, from what I had believed was a safe distance.
"Every single shift," Miller said, holding a cookie up to the light.
I looked at the ceiling and attempted to count to ten.
"Good things, I hope," Vera said to Rodriguez, composedly.
"Accurate things." He looked at her steadily for a moment, then nodded once. "Sit. Eat."
"And then can we visit the helicopter?" Vera asked.
Rodriguez looked at me. I shrugged. He looked back at Vera, and managed a smile with significant warmth underneath it. "And then you can visit the helicopter."
We settled around the long common room table, the scarred, utilitarian kind that had hosted a thousand shift meals. Vera passed out sandwiches like she organized things for a living, because she did, and then she unwrapped her own and looked around the table.
"Walk me through it," she said. "When a call comes in. What actually happens, in sequence."
"Alarm." Jackson pointed up. "Dispatch gives us location, acreage, conditions. We're geared up and rolling within five minutes for engine response, eight to ten if we're taking the bird."
"Because the helicopter takes longer to spin up?"
"Pre-flight checks. Rotor engagement. You can't rush it." I took a bite of my sandwich. "Our pilot, Gomez, runs through a twenty-point checklist every single time. No exceptions."
"What does the checklist cover?"
Stevens brightened. Stevens loved explaining things.
This was because Stevens had recently learned things, and the interval between learning something and wanting to explain it to someone was approximately four seconds.
He picked up his sub and began gesturing with it.
"Engine temps, rotor RPM, hydraulics, flight controls, fuel load, cargo weight and balance.
You have to balance a helicopter before you fly it—weight distribution affects everything.
Radio checks, rappel system inspection—"
"The rappel system," Vera said. "Tell me about that."
This was the moment. The moment where civilian partners either went pale, went quiet, or spent the rest of the relationship quietly catastrophizing every departure.
I watched her face. She was doing none of those things.
She had the complete, unhurried attention she gave everything she'd decided to learn.
"The helicopter hovers. We clip in using our harnesses. Class III, full body, carabiners rated for way over body weight. Figure-eight descender controls descent rate. Rope goes down first, we go down the rope."
"One at a time?"
"One at a time. Forewoman goes first." Stevens looked at me. "She goes first."
Vera looked at me. Something moved behind her eyes and settled.
"I assess conditions on the ground before the rest of my people come down," I said.
"And if conditions are bad?"
"I radio up and we abort." I held her gaze. "It's happened. We don't press past safe."
She nodded slowly. Processing it. Not performing calm—actually finding it, which was a harder thing to do. Under the table, her knee found mine. She nudged against me and left it there, warm and steady, like she was holding something in place.
"Who does the rope inspection?" she asked.
"Crew boss. Me."
"So you inspect the ropes that your people rappel on."
"Every time."
She looked at me. Something crossed in her expression that I recognized. It was the same look she gave the crew chief's seat. Comprehension. The expression of someone who has understood the full weight of a thing and is deciding how to carry it.
"Okay," she said. Then she picked up her sandwich and took a bite and said, "What does the spike kit have in it?" and the table just moved with her.
She asked good questions. All of them good. Not the ones civilians usually asked, which were generally some variation of how hot does it get and have you ever almost died. Vera asked about weight distribution and inspection schedules and decision-making under incomplete information.
"Tell me what it feels like," she said, after a while. "Not the technical part. What it actually feels like."
The table went quiet in the firefighter way. Jackson spoke first. "Like driving into bad weather. You can see the edge of it—clean world on one side, and the other side is completely different."
"Like a door," Stevens said. "You choose to go through it."
Miller's eyes were on his coffee. "Like respect," he said quietly. "It should always feel like respect. The day it stops is the day you make a mistake."
Vera looked at me.
"Purpose," I said. "Whatever else it is—and it's a lot of things—it's always that."
She nodded. Smiled. My heart did the thing it had been doing for five weeks now, that involuntary expansion, like something in my chest had decided it needed more room, like it had been waiting for an excuse.
"You're all remarkable," she said simply, to the table. "I want you to know that."
Stevens opened his mouth.
"Don't make it weird, Stevens," Jackson said.
"I wasn't going to make it weird—"
"You were going to say something earnest and then immediately ruin it."
"I was going to say thank you—and," he admitted.
"And what?"
A pause. "...and I think you're pretty cool for a librarian."
"There it is," Jackson said, throwing up his hands.
Vera lost the fight completely. Real laughing, the kind that required a hand over the mouth. Miller watched her laugh, and the closest functional equivalent to a smile crossed his face.
Rodriguez looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man who had made peace with his situation.
Stevens basically levitated after lunch.
"Helicopter now?" Already in motion. "I'll show her the rope cache, the harness room, the cargo staging—"
"In order. One thing at a time."
We walked the apparatus bay first. Vera moved through it the way she moved through the library, stopping at things that caught her interest and actually asking about them.
She stopped at the Pulaski rack and wanted to know why the head was shaped the way it was.
She stopped at the spike kit shelf and said "how far is ten miles in full pack weight in smoke?
" in a tone that was not even horrified.
Miller walked with us. This was not something Miller did for station visitors.
He strode alongside and answered her questions with compact accuracy, and when she asked something he found genuinely interesting, he stopped walking to answer it fully, which was the highest compliment in Miller's register.
At the rope cache, she asked about inspection protocols.
"The kernmantle," Miller said. "You're looking for sheath damage, core deformation, heat exposure. A rope can look fine and be gone. You don't guess."
"Who taught you that?"
"Man named Kowalski. Fifteen years I worked under him. Never once cut a corner on a rope inspection." He looked at the coiled bags on the shelf. "Retired to New Mexico. I called him when Alves made crew boss and told him his replacement had more guts than him, and she's a woman."
I looked at Miller. "You called Kowalski about me?"
"He asked how the program was going." One enormous shoulder shrug. "I told him."
"What did you tell him?"
"That you were stubborn as weather and twice as reliable." He picked up his coffee. "He said that was the best kind."
I had nothing to say to that. Stood in the rope cache holding a piece of kernmantle and swallowed against something tightening in my throat.
Vera, standing beside me in the narrow aisle, found my hand and squeezed it once. Quietly, briefly. Only I noticed.
Then she looked up at Miller. "Can I ask what Kowalski's first name was?"
"Frank."
"I'll look him up. There's a memorial wall in the library for first responders in San Jacinto history. If he ever served here—"
"Four seasons, '89 through '93."
"Then he's probably already on it." She pulled out her phone and made a note. "I'll check. If he's not, he should be."
Miller watched her type. Said nothing for a moment. Then, quietly, he murmured, "He'd like that."
The Bell 212 was even more impressive up close.
Vera walked around her once, slowly. She ran a hand along the tail boom. Looked up at the rotor head. Crouched to examine the skid landing gear.
"She's beautiful," she said softly.
"She's a workhorse. Twin turboshaft engines, carries six rappellers plus gear plus pilot and spotter. We run her lean. Every pound in the air is a decision."
"La Jefa," Vera said, to the helicopter rather than to me.
"You can't name-talk the helicopter," Stevens said, delighted. "That's only—"
"Only the crew?" Vera looked at him.
He looked at me. I looked at the helicopter. "She can name-talk the helicopter," I said.
He beamed. He was going to tell this story for years.
I opened the cabin door and helped Vera up, my hands at her waist, and she settled into the crew chief's seat—my seat, directly adjacent to the open door—and looked out at the helipad below.
Then she looked down. And went very still.
"This is where you sit," she said.
"Yes."
"With the door open."
"Yes."
"At altitude." Her knuckles went white on the doorframe. "You sit here, with your legs potentially dangling over two hundred feet of open air, calculating things about wildfires."