16. She’s Handled Mrs. Martinez’s Feelings About Email Attachments #2
Emerson was in his second season, twenty-five or so, still building the instincts that took years to develop. He'd grown up outside Flagstaff, had family in the fire service, and had the combination of physical confidence and genuine humility that meant he'd probably do well if he stayed at it.
Both of them greeted me with the easy familiarity of an acquainted crew before fire season. Both of them clocked Vera.
Emerson's reaction was the starstruck kind.
You know, the wide-eyed stare of someone who hadn't been expecting this specific person at this specific barbecue.
He recovered quickly, because he was twenty-five and reasonably self-aware, and then spent the first twenty minutes of the afternoon looking at his beer with considerable concentration whenever Vera laughed at something.
Vera caught him at it twice, and both times said something that made him laugh and released him from his own awkwardness, which was a skill I'd noticed she had. The ability to take the charge out of someone's admiration before it became a thing.
"She's good at that," I murmured to Jackson, during a lull near the drinks table.
"At what?"
"Making people comfortable with themselves."
Jackson considered this. "She treats everyone like they already belong," he said. "People feel that."
He wasn't wrong. She'd been here forty-five minutes and had already extracted Cassie's theory about the Outlander plotlines to discuss with Rodriguez's wife at a later date, learned that one of the seasonals from the Prescott assignment had a daughter who'd recently learned to read and was very into books about dogs, and discovered that Rodriguez's father was the one who'd originally suggested the barbecue tradition decades ago, which Rodriguez had not mentioned and which he confirmed with what I could only describe as sheepish respect.
"Rodriguez is sheepish," I said to Vera, during a moment when we were briefly alone together at the edge of the patio.
"He's also the kind of man who credits others for things, which means he understands attribution." She stole a chip from my plate. "Firefighters all sound remarkable to me."
"We really are." I caught her hand, held it, laughing at the look she shot me. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you make a room feel like you've always been in it."
She smiled at me. "You're doing the thing where you say something that makes it impossible for me to stop smiling for the rest of the afternoon."
"We're even then."
She kissed me openly in front of the crew and the seasonals and the remnants of the potato salad, and I didn't care even slightly.
The afternoon settled into its rhythm. Rodriguez held court at the grill, dispensing opinions about marinade that no one disagreed with because he was right.
Miller finished his first beer and started a second at approximately the pace of a glacier.
Jackson and Cassie got into a mock-serious disagreement about the cornhole tiebreaker rules that Stevens had printed out and laminated—he'd actually laminated them, because of course he had—and three separate seasonals got pulled into it before Vera stepped in and settled it with a ruling so logically ironclad that everyone accepted it immediately and Stevens looked at her like she'd performed a miracle.
"She'd be a good incident commander," Davids said to me, watching her explain the tiebreaker logic to a seasonal named Cruz who'd arrived late and needed catching up.
"She runs a library," I said.
"Same skill set."
He wasn't wrong about that either.
Vera had been pulled into a conversation at the far picnic table, something about the Painted Rock fire from two seasons back, where Davids and two of the other seasonals had been on engine support while my crew went in by air.
It was the kind of story that got told at barbecues, heavily edited for civilian company, but Vera wasn't quite civilian, not anymore, not after the station visit and the rope cache and the crew-chief seat of La Jefa.
"—and Alves comes rappelling down like something out of a movie, lands right in the middle of it, looks around, and the first thing she says is—"
"Where's my Pulaski," I said, from across the patio. "I had it when I went up."
The crew who'd been there lost it. Vera's hand found mine under the table.
"That tracks," she said. "She has a method for where things go."
"She does," Miller confirmed, from the end of the table. He'd been there for two hours. Still nursing that second beer, which looked like it had gone room-temperature. Watching everything. "The label-maker wasn't a surprise."
"I don't have a—" I stopped. "I use the label-maker for gear identification. That's operationally necessary."
"She labeled the coffee shelf," Stevens said, to general laughter.
"The coffee shelf needed clarification—"
"It had two items on it," Jackson said. "Coffee and the coffeemaker."
"Organization is proactive, not reactive—"
"She's exactly like this at home," Vera said cheerfully to the table, and everyone laughed, and I looked at the ceiling, which was the sky, so that didn't work as well as I needed it to.
Stevens had organized a cornhole tournament on a bracket he'd drawn on a piece of paper that kept getting more elaborate as the afternoon went on.
By the time Vera was recruited into it, there were tiebreaker rules, a loser's bracket, and a penalty round involving hot sauce that had been contributed enthusiastically by Cruz.
"I've never played cornhole before," Vera told Stevens.
Stevens straightened. "I'll teach you. It's simple. The hole is worth three points, the board is worth one. The main thing is your release angle and the arc."
"Like rappelling?" Vera guessed.
Stevens stopped and ran this comparison through his internal calculator with visible concentration.
"...Yes. Actually, exactly like rappelling.
You want a consistent arc on release, and you read the distance before you commit.
" He demonstrated, stepping up and throwing with the form of someone who had practiced this considerably more than was strictly necessary.
The bag dropped cleanly into the hole. "That's the movement. "
Vera studied it. Stepped up. Threw.
The bag went in the hole.
Silence.
"Beginner's luck," Jackson said.
She threw again. Hole again.
"Beginner's luck," Jackson said, with less certainty.
Third throw. Hole.
Stevens turned to me with an expression of pure wonder. "She has the arc."
"She has the arc," I confirmed.
"I went to the hole on my first try," he said, to no one in particular. "It took me three weeks to get consistent."
"She also parallel-parked my truck in a spot I wouldn't have attempted," I said. "She's like this about most things spatial."
"Library science," Vera said, accepting the tournament bracket Stevens had immediately begun updating. "Shelving requires an understanding of three-dimensional space."
Stevens wrote something on the bracket. I was fairly certain he was changing her seed ranking.
Cruz challenged her to a head-to-head round, which she won, and then Davids took over from Cruz, and they played three rounds that drew a loose crowd of seasonals because word had gotten around about the arc.
Miller watched from his picnic table without a word, but I saw the pride on his expression each time she scored.
Emerson got her a fresh drink between rounds without being asked and then immediately looked like he wasn't sure why he'd done it.
"Thank you," Vera said, completely naturally, and went back to the game, and Emerson looked at the ground, cheeks blazing. I didn't make fun of him.
The light was turning golden over the scrubland, the way Arizona light did in the late afternoon, when the heat started to consider backing off and the shadows went long and everything turned the color of something old and good and right.
It was my favorite time of day in the desert, and it was somehow better with Vera standing in the middle of it, winning a cornhole tournament she'd been recruited into forty minutes ago.
I went inside to grab more drinks from the station cooler, and it was good in there—cool and quiet, the familiar smell of the equipment bay, the comfortable dark after the bright afternoon. I grabbed the bottles, turned back toward the door.
And heard the voices from just around the corner of the patio, low that way two people sounded when they thought they were out of earshot.
Davids and Emerson.
"—I mean, come on. In that dress—"
Emerson laughed. The kind of laugh that knew exactly what it was agreeing to, completely complicit.
"Did you see when she leaned over the cornhole board?" Davids continued. "What I wouldn't—"
I stopped moving.
"—genuinely don't know how Alves concentrates at work knowing that's waiting at home—"
The cold moved through me fast and then burned out, replaced by something that was not quite anger and not quite anything I could name either.
"—legs, man, those legs in the stockings at the station visit, I heard she came in and half the permanent guys couldn't—"
I walked back out.
The patio went instantly quiet. Rodriguez was at the grill. Jackson was mid-sentence at the cornhole bracket table. Miller's expression didn't change, but he went still, too.
Davids and Emerson were at the corner of the patio. Davids saw me first, and something in his face shifted. Emerson followed his eyeline and went pale.
I crossed the patio and set the bottles down on the nearest table and approached them, haughty, fast-footed.
"Finish that sentence," I said, and both men took a step back in shock.
The quiet of the patio changed. Vera was at the cornhole board, twenty feet away. She'd stopped moving.
"Alves—" Emerson started.