The Grumpy Fireman's Secret Baby

1. Voluntary Leave

Chapter one

Voluntary Leave

OWEN

The Battalion Commander doesn't yell.

That's how I know it's over.

He sits across the desk with my personnel file open in front of him. The thing is thick as a phone book now. Incident reports. Write-ups. A complaint from a captain in the 14th who says I called him something I probably did call him.

The fluorescent light hums over us. Somewhere down the hall, a printer chews through paper. Normal station sounds. Guys living normal lives.

"You were the best fireman I ever ran, Peterson." He closes the file. "That's the only reason this thing is a file and not a termination letter."

I don't say anything to that either.

"Take the voluntary leave."

I don't say anything.

"Because the alternative won't be voluntary."

My fists sit on my knees like two stones. I look at them. I make them open.

Claire's ring hangs on its chain under my shirt, flat against my sternum. Two years it's been there. It'll be there when I sign this thing too.

There's a form on the desk. A pen beside it, laid out neat, like he knew how this would go before I walked in. He probably did. Everybody in this building has known how this would go for two years.

I sign.

He doesn't shake my hand. Smart man.

***

I'm on the interstate south of Chicago before the sun's all the way up. I didn't pack much. Duffel, boots, the chain around my neck with Claire's ring on it, tucked under my shirt where it lives.

Ninety days. That's what I told Tater on the phone last night. Ninety days to get my head right, then I come back and I get my job back. I do the math against the odometer. Second Saturday of October. That's the day I drive out of here.

Tater said, "Sure, brother." The way you talk to a drunk about his big plans.

The city thins out behind me. Warehouses, then suburbs, then fields. Illinois goes flat and stays flat.

Around Bloomington there's a billboard. Big smiling baby, crib furniture, forty percent off.

My hands tighten on the wheel.

Don't.

I turn the radio up. Some country station, a song about a truck. Good. Trucks are safe. Nobody ever got wrecked by a song about a truck.

Then the song ends and the next one starts, slow, a woman's voice, and I know it from the second note. Claire used to sing it doing dishes. Badly. On purpose, I always figured, because I'd come in to complain and she'd sing louder.

I hit the button. Static. I leave it on static for thirty miles.

Lunch is a diner outside Litchfield, because a man has to eat whether he wants to or not. Vinyl booths. Pie in a case. The waitress is sixty-something with reading glasses on a chain and she calls me hon.

"You want coffee, hon?"

That's all. That's the whole assault. And my hand closes on the edge of the counter and I have to look at the menu until the letters organize themselves again.

Anger, I know what to do with. A guy runs his mouth in a bar, that's easy. That's arithmetic.

Kindness comes in under the door.

She refills my cup twice without asking and pats the counter next to my hand when she drops the check, and I leave her a twenty on an eight-dollar tab and get out of there like the place is on fire.

***

Here's the thing about Claire. She hit my fire engine.

Not a fender tap. She backed her little gray Corolla into a parked, forty-four-thousand-pound engine in the station lot, and then she got out and argued that it was the engine's fault.

"It's red," I said. "It's the size of a house."

"It was in my blind spot."

"The engine was in your blind spot."

"Are you going to give me your insurance information or are you going to stand there being tall at me?"

"Ma'am, you backed into a stationary vehicle."

"Which was parked irresponsibly."

"In its own parking spot. At its own firehouse."

She crossed her arms. "The angle of that spot is a hazard. I teach fourth grade, and if one of my students drew a parking lot like this, I'd send it back."

"You'd send back a parking lot."

"I'd write see me on it."

Half my shift was watching from the bay door by then. Nobody was helping me. Rodriguez had his phone out.

"Okay," I said. "Here's what we'll do. I'll get you the insurance information, and you'll let me buy you dinner, and we'll call the whole thing even."

She blinked. First crack in the armor all day.

Then she said, "No," got in the Corolla, and drove off with my heart hooked on her back bumper next to the dent she swore wasn't there.

She said no for six weeks.

Then one day she showed up at the station with a plate of cookies and told me the cookies were an apology and dinner was a maybe, and the maybe depended entirely on whether I could go one full evening without being right about anything.

I couldn't. She married me anyway.

***

Missouri. The land starts to roll.

I stop for gas at a station off I-44 and a guy at the next pump is burning trash in a barrel behind the building, and the smoke drifts over and I stop breathing.

Not panic. Nothing that clean. My body goes somewhere without me and stands there a while.

The pump clicks off. I put the nozzle back. I drive.

***

Sundays were pancakes. That was her law, handed down like scripture. Didn't matter if I'd worked a twenty-four, didn't matter if the Bears were losing, Sunday morning was flour on the counter and batter on the ceiling because she never once in her life put the mixer on low first.

She had cold feet. All year. She'd shove them against my calves in bed and I'd holler and she'd say, "You run into burning buildings, Owen, you can handle my feet."

She kept a list on the fridge called Things Owen Was Wrong About.

Dated. Numbered. Laminated after the first year, because, she said, this was a permanent collection now.

Item fourteen was the time I swore the recipe said one cup of salt and defended it to the death.

Item one was "that I would ever say yes to him. "

I'd have argued item one. But she put it first so I couldn't, because you can't fight a laminated document, and she knew it, and she grinned at me every single time she added an entry.

The sonogram went up on the fridge in March. Held by a magnet shaped like a pineapple. Grainy little photo, looked like weather radar to me.

She took my hand one night on the couch and put my palm flat against her belly, low, and held it there.

"Say hi to your daughter, Owen."

A daughter.

We picked the name in a diner booth, arguing over a laminated menu.

She wanted something old-fashioned. I wanted something that couldn't be turned into a nickname by middle school boys.

We landed on Rosie and she cried into her hash browns and blamed the hormones, and I sat there in that sticky booth thinking no man in history had ever been this lucky, and someone should probably check my math.

Rosie.

I pass a sign that says SPRINGFIELD 22 and I try to say it out loud. Once. To nobody.

It doesn't come. Two years, and her name still won't come out of me.

***

The motel that night is off the highway outside Joplin. Forty-nine dollars. The AC unit rattles like it's got a bolt loose and the bedspread has cigarette burns older than me.

I lie on top of the covers with my boots on and watch headlights sweep across the ceiling.

I don't sleep. I didn't figure I would.

At some point after two I take the chain off and hold the ring in my fist and I let myself do the thing I ration out, the remembering, because if I did it all the time I'd never do anything else.

***

The tones dropped at 9:47 on a Tuesday night. Structure fire, multiple calls, working fire on arrival of first-due companies.

We were on the far side of the city covering another company's territory. The address came over the radio.

My address.

The rig went quiet all at once. Six men and no sound but the engine. Nobody looked at me and everybody looked at me, the way you look at a man on the edge of a roof, careful, sideways, ready to grab.

Beck said, "Owen." Once. That's all he had.

Rodriguez didn't ask. He flipped the lights and put his foot down and ran it, every red, the whole way across Chicago.

And the radio kept talking.

First-due on scene, heavy smoke showing. Give me a box alarm.

Companies going enroute. A battalion chief taking command. The dispatcher's voice flat and even, reading it out like a grocery list.

Fire through the roof, third floor. Strike a second alarm.

Third floor.

I was doing the math out loud by then. I didn't know I was doing it out loud until Beck put his hand on my shoulder and left it there. Eleven minutes out. Nine. Seven. Every transmission made the seven minutes longer.

Second-due reporting primary search on floors one and two negative.

One and two. Nobody said three. Nobody was saying three, and every man on that rig knew what it meant that nobody was saying three.

It wasn't enough.

It was never going to be enough. It was over before we cleared the first intersection. I know that now. I've driven that route ten thousand times in my head, every version, every light green instead of red, and I never get there. Not once.

Third floor was fully involved when we pulled up. My floor. Our windows.

I remember the truck company's ladder in the wrong place. I remember grabbing a halligan. I remember hands on me, a lot of hands, Rodriguez and Beck and a battalion chief I'd never met, and I remember fighting them. I put Beck on the ground. Beck, who stood up at my wedding.

They carried me out of the lobby of my own building. Four of them. I was screaming her name and part of me knows the whole block heard it and I have never once cared.

I woke up on a gurney in the back of an ambulance with an IV in my arm and a chaplain sitting where a paramedic should be.

You know what a chaplain's face means. Every firefighter knows what a chaplain's face means.

He said my name, gentle, like it was made of glass.

I don't remember the next four days. People tell me I was there. The service. One casket, regular size, like she was the only one in it. She wasn't.

The question came later, at the monument place. The man there was gentle as the chaplain. Did I want the second name carved. She hadn't been born yet, he said, careful, and some families choose to leave it.

I couldn't answer. Rodriguez answered for me.

Both names. Of course both names.

One casket. Two names on the stone.

Morning comes up gray over Joplin. I buy coffee from a machine and pour it out after one sip and drive.

Oklahoma. Then Texas, finally, the land opening up big and dry and familiar in a way I feel in my back teeth. I grew up out here. Left at twenty-two like the place was on fire behind me. Funny.

The interstates give way to state highways. The state highways give way to two-lane farm roads with grass growing up through the shoulder cracks. Hay bales. Cattle standing in tank ponds up to their bellies. A hand-painted sign for peaches, three miles ahead on the right.

My phone's got a text from Tater from an hour ago. YOU CLOSE? DEBBIE'S MAKING A brISKET AND WON'T LET ME NEAR IT. SAYS IT'S FOR YOU. HURRY UP SO I CAN EAT.

I don't answer. He knows I'm close. He's got some cousin at the county line probably calling in my position like it's a manhunt.

The sun's dropping into that late-afternoon slant that turns everything gold and long-shadowed, and I come around the bend past the Baptist church and there it is.

WELCOME TO WILLOWBEND. Pop. 3,847. The sign's been repainted since I left. Somebody added a little firehouse to the mural on it, right between the water tower and the courthouse.

The ring sits against my sternum, warm from my skin.

Ninety days. Get my head right. Go back.

I say it like a man saying grace over food he doesn't plan to eat.

Main Street rolls past the windshield. String lights over the road, up year-round like always. The Willow Mug with its window fogged. Petals and Blooms with buckets of sunflowers out front.

The Baptist church marquee says GOD RECYCLES. HE MAKES NEW THINGS FROM brOKEN ONES. I look away from that one.

Outside the feed store, an old man in a Briggs Catfish Farm cap squints at my truck, then straightens up like he's seen a ghost. His mouth moves. I can read it through the glass. That's the Peterson boy.

By supper it'll be all over town. The Peterson boy's back.

Half of them won't know from what. The other half will know exactly, because news finds Willowbend even when Willowbend isn't looking for it, and they'll have decided how to treat me before I unpack the truck.

Casseroles are probably already thawing.

A woman I don't recognize waves at my truck on pure reflex, waving at anything that moves, the way small towns do. I lift two fingers off the wheel. Muscle memory. Twelve years gone and my hand still knows the wave.

Two years since I stood at a graveside in Chicago. Two days of driving. And now here, the town I couldn't wait to leave, the only place left that'll have me.

My phone rings.

I'm not even through town. I'm not even past the feed store.

Tater's name on the screen. I put it on speaker.

"I can smell the brisket from here," I say.

"Don't kill me." There's noise behind him. An engine turning over. Men's voices, fast ones. "But how quick can you get to the station? Structure fire on Route 9 and I'm down two men."