18. Beck
eighteen
Beck
My phone buzzes twice, then keeps buzzing, notifications stacking up faster than I can read them as we roll back into range for the first time in three days.
Missed calls. A handful of texts from numbers I don't immediately place. I scroll past all of it looking for one name.
Ivy.
There's no wall of frantic messages waiting for me, no dozen unanswered texts stacking up in a panic. Just a handful, spaced over three days, the way someone sends messages when they understand the person on the other end can't necessarily answer.
A photo first. Cassidy, arms raised in triumph, pie filling smeared halfway to her ears. Beside her, Nolan looks like a man who has just been handed some very bad news.
Cassidy destroyed Nolan in the pie-eating contest, the message says. He's currently questioning all his life choices.
I laugh out loud, hard enough Reid glances over from the driver's seat.
“What?”
“Cassidy, apparently, is a competitive eater.”
Before I can type anything back, my own message from a few days ago finally goes through, the one I sent right before we lost service.
Heading to another division. Sounds like service is bad out there. Don't worry if you don't hear from me for a couple days. I'll call when I can.
Ivy's reply comes quickly.
This would have been helpful three days ago.
Apparently my phone would like you to know I'm going somewhere without service.
Very helpful.
Timing isn't its strength.
I can practically hear her laughing through the screen, which isn't good enough. I call her instead.
She picks up on the second ring. “Hi,” she says, and I have to take a breath before I answer, days of smoke and exhaustion and worry about what she must have been thinking all draining out of me at once.
“Hi yourself.”
“You're alive.”
“Mostly.”
“Thank you for trying to warn me.”
“I tried. The universe had other plans.”
“Russ got an update late yesterday.”
I wince, doing the math. “So it was two days before you knew what was going on?”
“Yeah.”
“I'm sorry.”
“It’s okay. I know how this works.” A pause, quieter. “I still didn't love it.”
“I didn't either.”
Neither of us says anything for a moment. She understands what happened. I understand what it cost her.
“Tell me about the Fourth,” I say. “You went to Silver Creek?”
“We did. It was good. Church booths, way too much food, Nolan trying to personally support every heritage represented in western Montana.”
“How'd that go for him?”
“Poorly. Which is how he ended up losing the pie-eating contest against Cassidy, which he has since described as the worst decision of his entire life.”
“I saw the aftermath.”
“You missed the lefse,” she says, her voice a little wistful. “Norwegian potato flatbread. Warm, butter, cinnamon sugar. It's my favorite thing at the festival. I wanted you to try it.”
“There's always next year,” I say, the words out before I've really thought about what they might mean.
I hear noises in the background. A door, voices, the layered noise of a lot of people in one room. “Where are you right now?”
“The Grangers'.”
Of course. Sunday. I'd lost track of what day it is.
“Is that Beck?” Annie's voice, distant but unmistakable.
Ivy laughs. “You've been made.”
“Put him on speaker!” That's Tessa.
There's a shuffle, and then I'm not talking to Ivy anymore. I'm talking to everyone.
“Beck!” Annie's voice comes through clear now. “Are you eating enough out there?”
“Eating fine, Annie.”
“He says that,” Reid calls from somewhere behind me, audible enough to get pulled into this too. “He's been living on protein bars and stubbornness.”
“That's not entirely inaccurate,” I admit.
“Hi, Beck!” That's Cassidy.
“Congratulations on the pie thing,” I say.
“Thank you,” Cassidy says, with the calm satisfaction of someone still riding a well-earned victory.
“It was close,” Nolan's voice cuts in, aggrieved. “I want that on record.”
“The record shows you lost by a significant margin,” Trevor says.
“Nobody asked you, Trevor.”
For a solid minute it's just noise, warm and chaotic, half a dozen conversations happening at once through a single speaker, Russ's voice cutting through eventually to ask how the assignment's going, whether Elk Ridge is treating us right.
I answer what I can. For a few minutes, the distance between Granite Creek and Timber Creek doesn't feel like several hundred miles at all.
Eventually Ivy's voice comes back, closer now, like she's stepped somewhere quieter.
“Sorry about that.”
“Don't be.”
“You should know better than to call during Sunday dinner.”
“Clearly.”
I tell her what I've learned in the last hour, that Elk Ridge expects to need us through the workweek, that if things hold steady we should be released Friday.
“Friday?” she says.
“That's the plan.”
“I like that plan.”
“Me too.”
Five more days. It's the first real number we’ve had since I left, something solid.
We've made it almost a week. A communication blackout that could have gone badly, that could have turned into something either of us held against the other.
Instead we're both still vested counting down toward Friday instead of counting reasons to doubt us.
Reid taps his watch, mouthing something about the briefing in ten minutes.
“I've got a briefing,” I say.
“It’s okay. I know you’re working.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Five days,” she says.
“Five days.”
We hang up. I lower the phone and look out at Granite Creek, smoke still hanging low over the ridgeline, crews still working.
A minute ago I had an entire kitchen in my ear.
Ivy. Annie asking if I was eating enough.
Dani telling me about Mabel sleeping on my bed.
Cassidy's quiet victory. Nolan, still not over the pie contest. Russ checking that we were doing all right.
Even Reid, somewhere behind me, listening the whole time.
All the sounds of a life waiting for me back in Timber Creek.
Out here, standing in the ash and the noise of an incident that isn't finished yet, I miss it. Obviously Ivy, but the rest of it too. That house full of people who've decided, somewhere along the way, that I’m part of it. Part of them.
I've spent most of my life being good at this. Arriving somewhere new, settling in fast, leaving without much trouble when the assignment ends. One temporary place after another. I've never minded the leaving because there was never anywhere I minded leaving.
I don't have a name yet for whatever's happening. But something's different, and I know it, standing here at the edge of a fire, thinking about people I haven't seen in a week like they’re the only thing worth thinking about.
Friday finally arrives.
We're released a few hours ahead of schedule, staffing catching up enough Elk Ridge doesn't need us through the afternoon shift after all.
Reid and I load our gear into the truck without much conversation, both of us running on a mix of exhaustion and momentum that comes at the end of a long assignment.
“We could stop at that place,” Reid says, about twenty minutes in, nodding at a sign for some roadside attraction.
“No.”
“You don't even know what I was going to say.”
“Does it add time?”
He considers this with more seriousness than the question deserves. “Probably.”
“Then no.”
He tries again an hour later, at a scenic overlook. My response is the same. Somewhere around the halfway point he glances at the clock and does some quick math.
“We're already three hours early.”
“Good.”
“Ivy isn't even going to be there. She'll be out working.”
“I know.”
He grins at me. “Just making sure we're clear on why I'm not getting to sightsee.”
I don't bother denying it. He's right, and there's no point pretending otherwise. We'll get to the crew house before Ivy does, and I still want every mile of this drive to go faster than it's going.
“You tell her we're arriving early?” Reid asks.
“No.”
The landscape starts looking familiar a while before we reach Blackpine.
Ridgelines I recognize, a turnoff I could probably find blind now.
My exhaustion doesn't go anywhere. Days of fire work don't just evaporate because I'm almost home.
But something underneath it sharpens instead, focuses, counts down the last miles with more attention than I've given anything in days.
Nobody's out at the trailhead when we pass it. No crew vehicles lined up outside the Ranger station. The road curves through the trees, and then the crew house comes into view.
Six weeks ago, it was just a place I'd been assigned to stay.
Now, it’s the place I've been counting the miles back to.