3. Ninety Days
Chapter three
Ninety Days
OWEN
Debbie Sue Monroe hugs like a car wreck. No warning, full speed, and you're pinned before you know what hit you.
"Owen Peterson." She says my name into my shoulder like I died and came back. "You got skinny. Chicago starved you."
"Chicago fed me fine."
"Chicago fed you sadness and gas station coffee. Get in here."
The Monroe house smells like brisket and yeast rolls and something with cinnamon in it. Twelve years since I stood in a kitchen that smelled like this. My body doesn't know what to do with it. Something in my chest pulls tight, then loose, then tight again.
Tater's at the stove wearing an apron that says KISS THE LIEUTENANT. He points a wooden spoon at me.
"Sit. Eat. We'll talk after."
"Talk about what?"
"After, Owen."
The twins come through the kitchen like a two-man hose team, all elbows and volume. One of them stops long enough to look up at me.
"Boys, this is your Uncle Owen. He knew your daddy back when he had hair."
"Are you the fireman from the TV city?"
"I guess I am."
"Daddy says you used to throw up on the Tilt-A-Whirl."
"Your daddy threw up first."
The kid nods like this checks out and runs off. From somewhere down the hall his brother hollers, "MAMA. HE CONFIRMED IT."
Tater doesn't even turn around. "That's slander in my own house."
Dinner is loud. I forgot dinners could be loud in a good way. Debbie loads my plate twice without asking. The twins fight over a roll. Tater tells the story about the Route 9 fire like I hung the moon out there instead of pulling a hose line and getting eleven stitches for my trouble.
Eleven stitches. My forearm itches under the bandage and I think about the nurse who put them there. The eyebrow. The mouth on her. A Labrador who thinks he's a doctor.
And it's not the mouth I'm stuck on. That's the problem. It's the rest of her. The way she leaned across me to set the last stitch and I forgot what my arm was for. There's a shape under those scrubs, and I noticed it, and I've been mad at myself about the noticing ever since.
I stab a piece of brisket harder than it deserves.
"You okay?" Debbie asks.
"Fine."
She looks at my plate. Looks at my face. Says nothing, which from Debbie Sue is louder than a siren.
After, the twins get sent to the bath and Debbie disappears with them, and it's me and Tater and two cups of coffee on the back porch. The sky out here still does the thing I forgot it does. Goes purple at the edges. Stacks up stars like it's showing off.
Tater lets the quiet sit a minute. Then he sets his mug down.
"Here's the deal."
"There it is."
"Department's short. Bad short. Hendricks moved to Lubbock, Ramos blew out his knee, and I got two kids fresh off probation who couldn't find a hydrant with a map and a prayer.
" He rubs the back of his neck. "Engine's twenty-six years old, Owen.
Held together with baling wire and the good Lord's patience.
That's what the fundraiser's for, but a new truck don't drive itself. "
"Tater."
"Your certifications transfer. I checked. Already talked to the chief."
"Tater."
"Ninety days. That's it. You said yourself you're here for the summer. Ride with me like the old days, keep my green kids alive, and go back to Chicago in October if that's what you want."
If that's what you want. Like there's a question in it.
"I'm on leave," I say. "You know what that means. It means Chicago doesn't want me on a truck right now."
"Chicago doesn't know you."
"Chicago knows me better than you do. It's got the paperwork to prove it."
He doesn't flinch. That's the thing about Tater. Grew three sizes since high school and none of it went to fear.
"I know you pulled Amos Kessler out of a burning house four hours after you crossed the county line," he says. "Bleeding, on no sleep, in borrowed gear. That's the paperwork I care about."
He lets that sit a second. Then, quieter: "This town never quit calling you ours, Owen. You're the only one who quit answering."
I look at the stars so I don't have to look at him.
"You're drowning, man." His voice drops. Gentle, which is worse. "I've watched you drown for two years from a thousand miles away. Least I can do is throw you something to hold onto."
I don't answer that. Can't.
"These probies," I say instead. "They on the same shift or split?"
"Same. Which is the problem."
"Who's got them on the pump?"
"Nobody worth a damn. Ramos was our pump guy."
"You can't run two green kids on one shift with no pump man. That's how somebody gets—" I stop. Hear myself.
Tater's looking at the stars like he didn't notice. He noticed. Man could win money at cards if Debbie let him.
The screen door bangs. Debbie comes out with a pie plate and three forks.
"Don't stop on my account. You were getting to the good part."
"Buttermilk," she says. "Fresh. Now, you can say no to Tater all night, honey, but nobody says no to my pie and stays welcome in Texas."
I look at the pie. I look at Tater.
"Ninety days," I say. "Not one more."
Tater grins so wide it's got to hurt. Debbie whoops loud enough to wake the twins.
Ninety days. Get my head right. Go back.
I keep telling myself that on the drive out to the farmhouse, like if I say it enough times it'll stay true.
***
The house is dark when I pull up. Course it is. Been dark three years, since Dad followed Mom by eight months and I flew in long enough to bury him and sign papers and fly out again.
The key still lives under the third porch board. Small towns.
Inside smells like dust and shut windows. Somebody, Tater probably, threw sheets over the furniture, and in the dark they look like a room full of people who gave up waiting on me.
I flip the hall light. Half the bulbs are out.
The kitchen doorframe stops me.
Pencil marks climb the white paint, dates beside them in Mom's handwriting. Owen, age 6. Owen, age 9. The lines stack up like water rising, year over year, all the way to seventeen.
Then nothing. The frame goes clean above that last mark.
Seventeen. The year I started telling everybody I was getting out of Willowbend the day I graduated. Like the house heard me and quit keeping track.
I put my hand flat over the marks. The paint is cool.
There's a version of this frame in Chicago that never got started. A doorframe in an apartment that isn't there anymore, waiting on a little girl who never got measured once.
I take my hand off the wall and don't look at it again.
My trophies are still on the shelf in my old room. District champs. Regional. A plastic gold man frozen mid-tackle for going on twenty years. There's a picture wedged in the mirror frame, me and Tater at seventeen, arms slung over shoulders, dumb as fence posts and happy about it.
Everybody in this house is gone. That's the roll call, standing in the doorway of my parents' room. Mom's reading glasses still on the nightstand. Gone, gone, gone, and here I am, the one who leaves and comes back too late.
I make up my old bed with sheets that smell like lemons from the closet. Sit on the edge of it. Take the chain off over my head.
Claire's ring catches the lamp light. Small gold circle. She had small hands and cold feet and a laugh that ran ahead of her jokes.
I hang the chain on the bedpost. That's the healthy thing, right? That's what the department shrink would say. Small steps.
I lie down. Stare at the ceiling.
The ceiling fan ticks. Somewhere outside a coyote starts up and another one answers.
The department shrink used to say. You don't put the weight down all at once. You set it down a little at a time.
Fine. It's four feet away. It's on the bedpost. It's not gone, it's right there.
I count the fan blades going around. I name the probies' problems. I run the pump panel on a twenty-six-year-old engine in my head, every gauge, every valve.
Four minutes. Maybe five.
I sit up and put the chain back around my neck.
The ring settles against my sternum where it's lived for two years, and only then does my chest unlock enough to breathe.
Small steps. Sure.
Sleep comes late and leaves early. In the gray before dawn, I carry my coffee out to the truck to drive nowhere in particular, and the radio comes on with the engine, some morning show, some laughing DJ, nothing, it's nothing, and my hand comes down on the steering wheel hard enough to split the skin over one knuckle.
The horn bleats. A dove lifts off the fence line.
I sit there breathing hard with blood on my hand over absolutely nothing. That's the part nobody tells you about grief. It stops announcing itself. It stops needing a reason. It waits in the truck with you.
"Okay," I say out loud, to nobody, to her. "Okay."
I wrap my knuckle in a napkin from the glove box and drive to the feed store for light bulbs, because that's a thing a functioning man does, and if I do enough functioning-man things in a row maybe I'll pass for one.
***
Monday morning, Station 1 smells like every station I've ever known. Diesel and coffee and bleach and rubber. My shoulders drop an inch before I clear the bay door. Traitors.
The engine's parked in the first bay and Tater wasn't lying. Twenty-six years old and every one of them showing. Somebody's kept her polished, but polish don't fix a pump.
"Peterson." Chief Weyland comes out of his office with a hand out. He was a captain when I was in high school, sneaking us into the station to slide the pole. Gray now. Same handshake, like getting caught in machinery. "Heard about Route 9. Hell of a first day back."
"Just held a line, Chief."
"Uh-huh. Amos Kessler tells it different, and Amos ain't quit telling it."
Amos ain't quit telling it. Which means the whole hospital's heard it by now. Which means she's heard it.
I don't know why that thought shows up or why it stands there with its hands in its pockets like it's got business here. I run it off.
It doesn't go far.
He jerks his chin toward the equipment room. "Come on. Let's get you outfitted."
Turnout gear, boots, helmet. He walks me through it like I've never seen bunker pants, and I let him, because it's his house and that's how it's done. The gear smells new. Grant money, he says. Some billionaire married into town a few years back.
"Radio protocols are posted, shift board's in the kitchen, and Tater'll ride you through your first calls." He stacks the gear in my arms. "One more thing."
He picks a paper off his desk and lays it on top of the pile like he's dealing a card he knows is bad.
It's a flyer. Fancy one. String lights and stars printed across the top.
STARLIGHT HALL. FUNDRAISER FOR ENGINE 1. And under that, in letters big enough to read from a moving truck:
BACHELOR LUNCH-DATE AUCTION. SATURDAY NIGHT.
I read it twice. It doesn't improve.
"Chief."
"Every unmarried man in this department is on that stage, son." He's already walking back to his office. Doesn't even turn around. "Chief's orders."