Chapter 14
Ty
I make coffee quietly and bring her one.
She opens one eye.
"You don't have cream?"
"I have cream."
"I don't want cream."
"Okay."
"I'm testing whether you panic."
"I don't." She sits up. The sheet is around her waist. Her collarbone has a small mark from my mouth that I notice at exactly the same second she notices it in the mirror across the room, and she looks at it, and she looks at me, and we both decide, silently, that it's going to be a turtleneck day. Today is the barbecue.
I had forgotten about the barbecue.
I hadn't forgotten about the barbecue.
"Today’s is the barbecue."
"Today is the barbecue," Hanna says.
"We'll be fine."
"Ty?"
"We'll be fine."
"We won't be fine."
"Define fine."
"Fine is a word meaning the state in which Cal doesn't, at a public fundraiser in front of eighty community determine that his best friend and his sister have, in the last twenty-four hours — "
"Okay."
"Okay."
"So, we're going to be careful."
"We're going to be careful." She drinks the coffee. Neither of us laughs at the word careful. We're both being respectful of the word.
The barbecue is held in the fire station parking lot because every year Big Jim insists on hosting it at the Watershed and every year Chief Rodriguez wins the argument on the grounds of parking and beer-licensing, and every year Big Jim brings his grill to the station anyway and sets up a second, unlicensed operation on the principle that Chief Rodriguez doesn't, in fact, know what the chief knows.
Station 7 does it the way it does everything — too much food, not enough chairs, Derek in a specific apron that says WARNING: THIS MAN HAS OPINIONS about which he's, annually, sincere.
There's a bounce house intended by our insurance for children under twelve.
Last year Rivera got in the bounce house after three beers.
Chief Rodriguez yelled at him for twenty minutes.
The yelling made it into Rivera's clipboard quote.
The sun is out. Eighty-one degrees. A good, awful day.
Hanna is already there. She's wearing a turtleneck, sunglasses, hair up, talking to Gemma with the specific body language of a woman holding a paper plate between herself and the rest of the universe as a shield.
Gemma is pretending to help her with a name tag while clearly whispering, because Gemma's face is doing everything.
I don't walk over. I walk to Derek.
Derek is at the grill. "You're on bun duty. Buns are in the truck." He hands me tongs. He's smirking — specifically smirking. I don't like his smirk.
"Hey." His voice drops, the smirk gone. "You good?"
"I'm good."
"You're sweating."
"It's eighty-one."
"You're sweating at eighty-one."
"Derek."
"Fine. Bun duty." He turns back to the grill.
I go do bun duty.
I see Cal. He's carrying a folding table, because Cal arrives at every event and immediately starts carrying folding tables, he's grinning at something Aiden said. He sets the table down and walks over.
"You seen my sister?" He looks at me.
Aiden answers before I can manage it. "No." It's out in under a second. I look at him. He looks back at me with the expression of a man who just threw himself in front of a train and would appreciate some acknowledgment.
"No. No, Cal," I say.
"Okay, tough guy, she's by the cooler." Aiden aims this at me, not Cal.
"I was asking because Mom wants to know if she brought the gummy bears."
"Right. The gummy bears." I shake my head. "Haven't talked to her."
Aiden tilts his chin at me. "You okay?"
"I'm vertical."
"You're doing the voice." He makes a hand gesture that's entirely unflattering and, in fairness, very accurate. "The thing you do when you're concentrating. Are you concentrating?"
"I'm on bun duty."
"The buns are that serious?"
"The buns," I say, with all the sincerity I can muster, "are very serious."
He claps my shoulder and walks away. I stand there with two bags of hamburger buns and briefly consider driving to a small town in Montana I've never heard of and changing my name to something like Rick.
I don't do that. I carry the buns to the grill.
The Academy Story gets told again.
This is inevitable. It's been told at every Station 7 gathering since I joined the house — how we haze new probies, how we haze old probies, specifically how we haze me, because I'm the only one here who was at the academy when it happened.
Cal tells it. The official version is about the sprinkler system, the lineup, the water damage, and Instructor Walsh's face.
The official version doesn't include Hanna.
The official version doesn't have her in it at all.
Today Cal tells it by the grill with a beer in hand and at least twenty people within earshot — Hanna, Riley, me, Derek, Mrs. Patel and her nephew the bass-fishing accountant (thirty-one, tall, pleasant, and entirely the wrong height for Hanna), Chief Rodriguez, Big Jim, Gemma, and the new probie whose name I haven't memorized.
"So, picture it," Cal says. "Academy dorms. Second month. Brennan is running the floor, or thinks he's running the floor. Sprinkler inspection at seven a.m. Brennan has to lead it. Walsh is watching."
"Walsh was a monster," I say.
"Walsh was the monster. And Brennan, this beautiful idiot, apparently hasn't slept. He's spent his night doing — something. I don't know what. Reading, probably. He's a reader."
Hanna, to my left, takes a sudden interest in her macaroni salad.
"So, Brennan stands up in front of Walsh to lead the inspection, and he's wearing — " Cal pauses. "I've never told this part. Because I've been sitting on it."
"What," I say. I intend this to be calm.
"Because my cadet partner told me years later — " He's building now. I'm no longer calm. " — that Brennan was wearing, on this specific morning, a t-shirt that wasn't, in fact, his own t-shirt."
The grill crackles. Derek leans in. Riley's eyebrow is doing its thing. Hanna has stopped eating.
"Not his t-shirt?" Mrs. Patel asks.
"Not his t-shirt. He's wearing a t-shirt belonging to some other cadet on his floor — we never did find out who — and the shirt is two sizes too big, the shoulder seam halfway down his arm — "
"Cal."
" — and he stands up in front of Walsh like this, and Walsh looks at him, and Walsh doesn't say a word.
Just looks. And Brennan — this Brennan, this man — " Cal is pointing at me with his beer.
" — doesn't know he's wearing someone else's shirt inside out.
He thinks it's his. He thinks it's correct.
He stands there for forty-five minutes leading a full inspection in somebody else's inside-out shirt and Walsh lets him. "
The crew loses it. Derek bangs the tongs on the grill. Rivera slaps his knee. Riley's eyebrow climbs to new altitudes. Mrs. Patel is laughing with a hand over her mouth. Big Jim, silent, is shaking.
I'm still holding the tongs. I can't think what to do with them.
Hanna stares at me across the table.
Her face does absolutely nothing.
The Poker Face deploys with the efficiency of an airbag. Her eyes are a wall. Her mouth is a line. Derek, who's been running Poker Face odds on her since Week Two, looks at me once, quickly — the look says: my guy.
"Brennan." Cal wipes his eye. "You all right?"
"I'm here."
"You didn't know about the — "
"I didn't know about that, Cal, no." I pause. "Who told you that? You said a cadet partner?"
"Uh." Cal sucks his teeth. "I don't remember. Years ago. Some guy."
Hanna drinks water. Specifically, she finishes her water.
"It was me," Hanna says.
Everybody turns.
"What?" Cal stares at her.
"I told you. At Thanksgiving. You were drunk. I told you."
"You were at the academy that week?" Cal turns back to me.
"I visited. Mom flew me out for that week," Hanna says.
She says visited the way a surgeon says I made an incision — technically accurate, not the whole picture. I watch her say it and I think about the three months she's not saying, and I think about the fact that she is the most precise liar I have ever met in my life.
"Wait, really?" My voice comes out a half step too surprised.
"Really. I saw him do it live, Cal."
Cal laughs so hard. The crew is cackling. Mrs. Patel is wiping her eyes.
Hanna looks exactly like a paramedic delivering a clinical fact at a social occasion — no smirk, nothing moving.
She's operating the Poker Face at a rare level, and she's also telling one true thing stacked on top of another true thing, and if Cal starts stacking, the whole thing will collapse like the sprinkler system did.
Cal doesn't stack.
"How come I don't remember you at the academy that week," he says.
"You had that stomach thing that week. You were in the health center for two days."
"I mean we never overlapped. You being there that week," Cal says to Hanna.
"I was there. And watched Brennan wear a stranger's shirt. Among other things," Hanna says.
She says it so flatly that Derek chokes on his hot dog. Cal, bless him, doesn't hear the choke. He claps me on the back.
"Ty. Buddy. Sitting next to my sister for ten years and you never knew she saw it live."
"No. I didn't know that."
"Sister's a snitch," Cal says.
"Appears so."
Hanna takes a bite of her hot dog.
Derek's rubber-chicken-and-chart routine is at one-fifteen.
The chart is a whiteboard that says HANNA'S SMILE: A SCIENTIFIC STUDY, complete with bar graphs, dates, and a small corner illustration of a firefighter Cupid.
The rubber chicken has a beanie on it. The chicken is named Roger.
"Ladies," Derek says. "Gentlemen. Big Jim — dad"
"Derek."
"I've been studying, for research purposes only, the smile output of our own Hanna Larsen since the second week of her tenure at Station 7 — "
"Derek."
"— and I'm prepared, today, to present — "
"I'll pay you forty dollars to stop," Hanna says.
"Forty doesn't cover the research."
"Forty-five."
"Ma'am. You insult me."
"Seventy."
"Seventy." He pockets the hypothetical seventy, sets the chicken down, and walks away with the whiteboard.
Her face has done nothing during the entire exchange.
The crew is baying. Derek bows on his way out.
I, standing next to the grill, haven't managed a single facial expression, and I'm fairly certain Rodriguez has noticed.
Rodriguez has definitely noticed.
Rodriguez catches me at the ice chest.
"Brennan."
"Chief."
"Good crowd."
"Yes, sir."
"Station's running good."
"Yes, sir."
"You're eating."
"Yes, sir."
"Brennan." She leans against the cooler. "I've been at this a long time. Thirty-one years. I've seen a lot of shifts." She pauses. "And I've seen this shift specifically, in the last few weeks, going through a — " she gestures with her hot dog " — a period. An adjustment."
"Yes, sir."
"You getting enough sleep?"
"Yes, sir."
"You'd tell me if something at my station was going to interfere with the job?"
I pause — not because I don't know the answer, but because the job is the phrase she used, and it sends a cold bolt down my back.
"Yes, sir."
"You would?"
"I would, Chief."
"Good." She pats my shoulder and walks away.
Chief Rodriguez knows. She's known the way chiefs know these types of things, because chiefs know everything.
She hasn't asked me to say it. She's asked me to know that she knows.
The conversation, in chief-language, is over.
I'm on notice — unofficially that she has my back if I do the right things and will need to formalize things if I don't. The right thing is to sort it out before she has to.
I drink my water and look around the parking lot. The number of people here who know something Cal doesn't is no longer a comfortable number.
The near-miss comes around two.
I wipe barbecue sauce off Hanna's wrist.
That's it. That's the whole thing. She's eating a rib, she gets sauce on the inside of her wrist, and I — without thinking, because I've been next to her for forty-five minutes and the instinct I've been suppressing all day is the instinct that reaches for her — take a paper napkin off the stack and touch her wrist with it.
I do it for two seconds too long. Three, maybe.
I don't kiss her wrist. I don't hold it. I wipe barbecue sauce off the pulse point on the inside of her wrist with a paper napkin for two or three seconds too long, with my face composed and my other hand flat on the table.
I let go.
I look up.
Rodriguez, across the lot, turns to look at Big Jim's grill. Big Jim, at his grill, is looking at the coals. Riley, to my left, has turned completely around.
And in the line of three adults chewing hot dogs between me and the volleyball net, I catch the eye of the one person who saw and isn't either pretending or politely not looking. He's staring straight at me.
It's Mateo — Chief Rodriguez's oldest son, twenty-two, home from college, helping with the dunk tank. He has neither the tact nor the community standing to let it go. I watch him look at Hanna, then at me, then at Cal across the lot laughing with Aiden. I watch a decision settle onto his face.
He turns. Starts toward Cal.
Riley, without hesitation, sets her plate down and intercepts.
I don't know what Riley says. She says it in about five seconds. Mateo blinks, nods, walks back to the dunk tank. Riley returns to her spot at the table.
"What did you say to him?"
"Tell you later."
"Riley — "
"Later, Ty."
Hanna, who's watched all of it, sits very still beside me. Her coffee is empty, turtleneck intact, sunglasses on. Her right wrist, the inside, has a faint smudge of barbecue sauce I didn't quite reach in those two or three seconds.
"Ty?"
"Yeah?"
"We're telling him tomorrow."
I don't Okay her. I don't ask for details. I look at the grill, where Derek is flipping a burger with Roger the beanie chicken presiding from the side table, and I pick up my iced tea.
"Okay."
"Tomorrow."
"Okay."
"I don't know how."
"I know."
"I need your help."
"Yeah."
She reaches under the lip of the picnic table and takes my hand for one second. Then she lets it go.
In the parking lot, on a warm afternoon, a Station 7 community barbecue unfolds: children in the bounce house, Derek's whiteboard disappearing into the equipment bay, Big Jim in his apron, Chief Rodriguez eating her hot dog, Cal Larsen — my best friend, my brother, the last loud person in Copper Ridge who hasn't been read in — telling the Academy Story to a new audience by the grill.
I watch Cal laugh. I watch him wipe his eyes. I watch him clap the new probie on the back.
Tomorrow.