The Fireman's Homecoming

by Allie Pleiter

  “Everybody loves your dad,” Clark said after a moment, his eyes returning to a professional assessment of her ankle as his warm fingers tested muscle and joint. “They were praying for him in church while he was in the hospital and Barney told me people have been by to help.”

  “Sure, now. What about weeks from now when he’s still sick? Sicker.”

  “The help will still be there. Honestly, you’ll probably get more help than you need, the way folks like to poke their noses in around here.” He looked up at her again as he reached for her running shoe. “It’s going to be okay.”

  His eyes were intense, focused, compelling. She had a vision of him reaching a victim in a cloud of smoke, extending a hand, saying those words with the same lure of confidence he exuded now. Trouble was, Clark only saw part of the fire burning around her—the disease, the logistical challenge. He had no idea of the full-blown firestorm licking at her heels. How she wasn’t the least bit sure it was going to be okay ever again.

  It wasn’t his problem. It wasn’t fair to make it his problem, either.

  Melba took the shoe, stuffing the urge to tell all back down with the same effort she forced her swollen ankle back into its shoe.

  Both hurt far too much.

  Chapter Five

  Charlotte Taylor was a sight for sore eyes. Melba hugged the stuffing out of her coworker and best friend as she got off the train in Gordon Falls. “I’m so glad to see you!”

  Charlotte, who was an urban girl to the core, spun around on her black leather boots to squint at the little train station with her mouth open. “Wow, girl, you live in a postcard. I feel like I’m on a movie set.” She nudged Melba. “You grew up in this place? Really?”

  It was a funny thing, living in a place like Gordon Falls. People thought of it as peaceful and perfect, not at all ready to think of it as having bumps and warts like any other community. “Mom used to say Gordon Falls was like a duck swimming upstream. Peaceful and charming on the surface, furiously paddling with big clumsy feet underneath.”

  Her words must have had more of an edge than she realized, for Charlotte dropped her overnight bag and took Melba by both shoulders. “That bad already?” she said quietly. Charlotte had lost her grandfather to Alzheimer’s two years ago, and as such she’d become Melba’s go-to shoulder to cry on. Just the look in Charlotte’s eyes returned the lump to Melba’s throat.

  She shook it off, picking up Charlotte’s bag and putting an arm around her friend instead. “Yes and no. I’ve got an hour before we have to be home, so let’s go introduce you to some excellent apple pie.”

  “Pie. This really is a movie set. We’re riding in an actual car, aren’t we? Not a horse and buggy?”

  Charlotte was the kind of friend who could make Melba laugh even in the worst of circumstances, which was exactly why she’d called her to come out for an overnight visit. Besides, she knew the daily life of Alzheimer’s, so Melba felt comfortable bringing her to the house where she still wasn’t comfortable with lots of company yet. Dad could be so unpredictable, and not everyone could handle that. “My car is right there. We’re quaint, but not that quaint.”

  Charlotte tucked herself into the passenger seat. “I half worried I’d find you in a bonnet and apron or something.”

  Melba rolled her eyes. “I went ninety miles down the interstate, Charlotte, not back in time.”

  Turning to look at her for a long assessment, Charlotte sighed. “You look tired. How are you holding up?”

  “Some parts are okay, others have been...” Melba didn’t know how or where to begin. “...startling.” She put the car in gear. “You know what it’s like.”

  “Still, it hits everyone different. It hits every day different.” Charlotte reached out a fingerless-gloved hand to give Melba’s shoulder a squeeze. “I’m glad you called. You need backup to do this. It’s just too nuts to handle alone. I have Mom, but for you...well, it’s just you.”

  “I have Barney. And a month’s worth of church casseroles.” Melba seized the chance to talk about something happy. “How—and where—is Mima?”

  “Oh, you know Mima.” Charlotte exhaled. Her grandmother had taken life by the horns after her husband’s long decline, and become a world traveler. “Where’s Mima?” had become a grown-up version of the children’s search book Where’s Waldo? at Melba’s office. Half of Melba’s yearning to travel the world had been nurtured by Mima’s tales of adventure. “Indonesia at the moment, then home for the holidays, then I think it’s Greenland.”

  Melba laughed. “Greenland? Why?”

  Charlotte shrugged her shoulders, setting her long blond hair swinging. “Why not?”

  “Your grandmother never did need a reason.”

  Charlotte whipped out her ever-present smartphone, fingers flying. “I’m sending her a message right now, asking her to flood you with postcards. What’s your address here in Charmingland?”

  “Mima texts?”

  “Mima is a thoroughly modern woman. I bought her a smartphone for her birthday.”

  Melba gave the address as she pulled into Cafe Homestead, informing her friend that it was the purveyor of the state’s most delicious apple pie as well as an impressive selection of tea. Life felt a bit more in place now—good tea and a good friend made a world of difference.

  * * *

  An hour later, pie consumed, introductions made, and Dad happily dozing in front of the television set, Melba and Charlotte sat across from each other on the bed in Melba’s room. Melba leaned back against the headboard and fingered the eyelet lace on a yellow throw pillow left over from her teenage years. “I feel like I’m fifteen and having a sleepover,” she said, staring around at her once-beloved butter-colored walls and cream curtains.

  Charlotte ran her hands through the fringe on one of the fabrics Melba had draped over those cream curtains. “It’s like you just spread the Melba I know overtop a lemon meringue pie or something.” She laughed when Melba moaned. “No, it’s sort of fun. I bet you thought this was fab-u-lous when you were that age.”

  “It’s a bit weird to me now. It’s home, but then again it’s foreign territory. Like the layers won’t fit together right anymore.” She caught a photograph of her and her mother—a sunny, smiling scene from a visit home just after she’d moved to Chicago—and felt her throat tighten.

  Charlotte rolled over to perch on her elbows. “Okay, we’ve done all the preliminary niceties, so why don’t you tell me what’s up?”

  Melba swallowed hard. “I thought this would be easier, you know? Like a list of tasks or coordinating medications or just being around.” It was the tip of the iceberg—the big, dangerous emotional iceberg waiting to sink her Titanic—but she couldn’t think of another place to start.

  Charlotte’s smile held the edge of remembered pain—her grandparents had lived with her right up until the end. “It’s hard stuff. Taking care of Grandpa was like going to war some days. With an enemy you can’t see or predict or even fight. You can only duck out of the way and hope you survive.”

  The metaphor seemed to offer a way to say the unthinkable out loud. “I didn’t duck, and I’ve already been hit.” The tears came out of nowhere, like they seemed to too often these days. “A big bomb dropped on me, Charlotte, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  Charlotte scrambled across the bedspread to pull Melba into a fierce hug. “Yeah, you did know what to do. You called me. We saved the Colorado Alpaca Fleece account, girl, and that means we can tackle just about anything.”

  Somehow pacifying an irate alpaca fleece supplier whose product had been mislabeled—twice—didn’t seem a match for what Dad had dumped on her, but Melba let the feisty energy of Charlotte’s hug soothe her soul. She cried on her friend’s go-to shoulder for a minute or so, then pushed her hair out of her eyes. “That was a monster of a prob
lem, wasn’t it? This problem is a bit harder to solve, though. This bomb has...real damage potential.”

  Charlotte sat up. “Okay, start at the beginning.”

  Pulling her knees up to hug them, Melba let the words crawl out, small and vulnerable. “Well, you know Dad got pretty sick last week, and his mind sort of...short-circuited.”

  “Good way to put it,” Charlotte sighed. “I always thought ‘dementia’ sounded so gruesome.”

  “He said some things. One thing, actually, that was a big shocker.” Melba steeled herself with a deep breath, sure it would make the thing more awful to hear it spoken out loud. “He said...he said I wasn’t his.” There. She’d said it and not melted into the carpeting.

  It took Charlotte a few excruciating moments to grasp what Melba was saying. “You mean, not his daughter? Biologically?”

  Melba could only nod. It was so much more complicated than biology.

  “Really? I mean, you’re sure? You said he wasn’t himself—maybe he didn’t know what he was saying.”

  “He knew what he was saying.” Melba let her head fall back against the headboard. “He just didn’t know he was saying it to me. He thought he was talking to Mom. He keeps mixing me up with her, talking to me like I was her. Then all of a sudden he yelled at me—at Mom—for making him keep it a secret. Said ‘she’—meaning me—ought to know, that it was wrong I didn’t know.” She managed to drag her gaze up to look at Charlotte’s startled blue eyes. “He talked as if he’d wanted to tell me for years—which means he’s known for years—but Mom wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Calling that a big shocker is an understatement. I think that qualifies as earth-shattering.”

  New tears sprung up in Melba’s eyes. It did feel earth-shattering. As if everything around her had shifted off its foundations and cracked into pieces. Only no one else could see the destruction. She tried to say something, recapture the margins she’d drawn around the secret, but it had spiraled out of her grasp. “It’s such a huge lie. And for so long. Why? Why do that to me? Why do that to anyone?” The tears surged up out of her control again. Sadness, and a sharp edge of anger she hadn’t even realized was there. “I feel like this is eating me alive, and I don’t even know for sure.”

  “You need to know. You’ve got to. I mean, how can you do anything at all until you know for sure?”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  Charlotte scooted up to sit next to her, throwing one arm around Melba’s shoulders. Stretching out her long legs to cross them at the ankles, Melba heard Charlotte’s “take action” voice kick in. Charlotte was a consummate problem solver, creative and rarely ruffled. “There’s got to be a dozen ways to check this out.” Her brows knit together and the fingers of one hand drummed against her thigh. “Only now that I think about it, you ought to ask yourself—do you really need to know?”

  Melba glared at her. “Of course I need to know. You just said I need to know.”

  “I know I said that, but, Melba, does it change anything?”

  “It changes everything. My dad’s not my dad!” Melba felt like she wanted to throw something, to hurl anything within reach at the wall of doubt that had just risen up in front of her life.

  Charlotte shifted to look into Melba’s eyes with a serious expression. “That’s not true. Your dad is still the father you’ve known. Mort has been your father your whole life. He loves you and you love him. The only thing that’s changed is...well...genetics.”

  “And truth.”

  “Oh, kiddo.” Charlotte sighed, her eyes softening, “I don’t mean to be negative, but we all know how this trip ends. Given the little time you may have left with your dad, does it change a lot of who he was for you? Who he is to you?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore. My history’s been yanked out from under me like...like Dad’s memory.” The thought was poignant and painful in extremes.

  “I take it you’ve asked him.”

  Melba shrugged deeper into the nest of yellow pillows. “Oh, and that went well. Denied the whole incident, when I think he actually did remember it. Some little bit of panic around the edge of his eyes told me he knew exactly what I was talking about. Then he spilled his coffee and it all tailspinned into a rant—as things tend to do now. Using Alzheimer’s as an out? Who sanctioned that?”

  Charlotte laughed. “Who sanctioned that?” was a favorite declaration of their boss when someone made a choice she didn’t agree with. Startled at her own ability to still crack a joke, Melba found herself laughing a little bit, too. And then a lot. A burst of healing giggles that seemed to untangle the knot of stress in her chest. “See?” Charlotte said as she used a tissue to salvage what was left of her mascara. “You’re still in there somewhere. You’re still you.”

  “Am I?” It was an enormous question to hang on two little words.

  “Yes, you are.” Charlotte’s eyes squinted up in problem-solving mode. “What’s something you used to like doing with your dad? Something you could still do now?”

  Melba had to think. “I’ve spent so much brain power on everything he can’t do anymore, I hadn’t even thought about what he can do. It’s not much.”

  Charlotte jumped off the bed to circle the room, as if scanning for clues. “Can he walk?”

  “As long as it’s not far.”

  “Any favorite spots?”

  “Everyone loves the river here, but that’s hardly...” It hit her like a happy lightning bolt, a surge of warm memory. “Ducks.”

  Charlotte turned. “Ducks?”

  “We loved feeding the ducks when I was a kid. We even did it once after Mom’s funeral. He loves to feed the ducks down on the riverbank.”

  Charlotte pointed a finger at Melba with a wide smile. “We need to feed the ducks, then. You, me and your dad. Tomorrow.” She showed her lifetime-city-dweller status when she raised a blond eyebrow and asked, “What do ducks eat?”

  “We always fed them the heels of bread loaves.”

  The eyebrow arched farther. “The what?”

  Melba laughed, the sensation warm and expansive and infinitely welcome. “Where did you grow up? Bread heels? The crusty end pieces nobody wants?”

  Charlotte blinked. “You’re not supposed to eat those?”

  It was a full two seconds before Melba registered that Charlotte was toying with her. She flung a pillow at her friend. “You’re impossible.” A second and third pillow followed. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  * * *

  “You want to take her out for the afternoon?” Max Jones dangled the boat keys in front of Clark with a knowing smile.

  “I expect I’ll only need an hour.” The boat was in pristine shape with lovely lines. While chief was one of only two paid positions in the large volunteer fire department—Chad’s being the other—the salary wasn’t huge. Clark was glad he had savings enough to consider the boat when he’d heard Max was selling it. Jones had taken excellent care of her, and Clark doubted it would take more than fifteen minutes on the river to sell him on the craft.

  Max grinned. “So take two. By the way,” he called over his shoulder as he walked back up the dock steps toward the riverfront kayak shop he owned, “I heard if you go up around the bend by the bridge, your cell service drops off the planet. Just in case you’re looking to disappear.”

  As if to force the issue, Clark’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. The fifth text message this hour, two from Dad. For a man who claimed to be “old-fashioned,” George Bradens had taken to texting with entirely too much enthusiasm. Even the younger firefighters had started joking about getting “Gexts,” friendly “just checkin’ up” texts from Chief George. Technology had handed the chief a new way to meddle, and Clark moaned in regret as he flipped open his phone to read some unimportant detail that surely could h
ave waited. “Just beyond the bend, huh?”

  “Works every time!” Max shouted from the door of his shop.

  Alone, on the water, in a beautiful boat, out of cell service. It sounded like an hour or two of bliss. Worth emptying his entire savings, not just the large chunk of it the boat would cost. Thanks, Lord, for knowing just what I needed today, Clark prayed as he hopped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. The deep, gurgling sound of an outboard motor on the river filled his heart immediately. Nothing spoke of home and peace to Clark like time on the river. Despite the enormous lake right in front of the city, he’d somehow managed to feel land-locked in Detroit. As he cast off the dock lines, Clark felt like he had flung bindings off his own lungs that he didn’t even know were there. Here, churning the river underneath him, was the antidote for the tight squeeze of Gordon Falls. This would be his escape, the valve that would allow him to let off steam when the pressures of work and small-town life got to him. As he pulled away from the dock, the whole thing seemed so much more doable, so much less overwhelming than it had even an hour ago. You knew, Clark mused with his eyes toward heaven. When he’d caught wind of the boat for sale, he could think of nothing else. The fact that the name on the back of the boat was “Escape Clause” practically sealed the deal.

  Slicing through the river’s gentle current, Clark felt the world expand around him. Space and grace as far as the eye could see. Gordon Falls was a pretty town from the street, but she was stunning from the river. Even in the muted colors of spring, with mud everywhere and things just beginning to bud, Clark felt himself fall a little bit back in love with the town he’d grown to hate as an angry teenager. The town he’d fled at the first possible opportunity. The town that, in less than a month, he’d be sworn in to protect as fire chief.

  Within the space of fifteen minutes, Clark felt himself grinning in the pale afternoon sunshine as he pushed the throttle to send the boat faster. On this small river, he couldn’t set off at wild speeds like some sort of ocean race boat, but the wind tumbling through his hair was energizing. The stress blew off him, sloughing off his spirit to sink in the white foam of his wake. Like the motorcycles of his youth but yet altogether different. Pulse-racingly perfect.