The Fireman Finds a Wife

by Felicia Mason

  She prayed for them both, asking the Lord to give each man the strength he needed for the coming days.

  “Hey, Summer.”

  She looked up to see Cameron standing in the doorway of the waiting room. She rose as he came in.

  “How is he doing?”

  Cameron grinned. “He wants to meet you.”

  “Me?”

  He nodded. “Do you mind?”

  “Of course not,” she said, picking up her bag. “Lead the way.”

  As she entered the room, Summer realized she hadn’t been in a hospital in many years. Not since her father’s illness and death.

  The man sitting up in the hospital bed was a big guy. He winced as if in pain and Summer’s heart went out to him.

  Cameron led her to the bedside and made the introductions.

  “Summer Spencer, this is Mickey Flynn, the best firefighter on the planet. Mickey, this is Summer.”

  The man stared at her, his mouth open.

  “Lovie?”

  Cameron groaned. “See, I told you he was a ladies’ man.”

  Summer stepped closer, peering at the man who’d lifted his hand toward her. She took it in his.

  “You’re lovely, like Lovie.”

  She glanced back at Cameron. “Mickey Flynn. Michael Flynn?”

  “You...you look just...like someone I used to know.”

  “You’re him. I...” She looked between the two men. Cameron seemed confused. Mickey was squeezing her hand. His grip incongruous with a man who was as ill as he was.

  “You know each other?” Cameron asked.

  Summer placed her other hand on top of Mickey’s.

  “Lovie,” he said.

  “Lovie? Isn’t that your mother’s name?”

  “Darling?” Mickey rasped.

  “Yes,” Summer said. “My maiden name was Darling. My mother is Louvenia.”

  “Gardner.”

  Summer gasped. “I knew that name sounded familiar. You’re Michael Flynn. The Michael Flynn.” She turned to Cameron who’d come around to the other side of the hospital bed and was intently studying Mickey.

  “Sit,” Mickey said. “Tell me. Lovie. How is she?”

  He let her hand go long enough for Summer to pull a chair closer to the bed.

  “How does he know your mother?” Cameron asked.

  Summer saw the exact moment when light dawned on Cameron.

  “The one that got away,” he said. “Your mother...” He stared at Mickey. “Her mother was the one who got away.”

  Mickey’s color was high. He seemed to have recovered from seeing the woman from his past walk into his room looking exactly as she had decades ago. While the four Darling sisters all resembled each other, everyone always said Summer looked most like Lovie did in her younger days.

  “When you said your friend’s name was Michael Flynn, I couldn’t remember why it was familiar,” Summer said. “When he called me Lovie, it all fell into place. My mom used to date a Michael Flynn before she met and fell in love with my dad. We all knew about it because it was a part of my parents’ story.”

  Mickey nodded. “She was the only woman I ever loved.”

  Summer’s eyes teared up. “Oh, Mr. Flynn. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...”

  “Not your fault,” he said. “What was meant to be was meant to be. She found happiness with John, and I was glad that she was happy. And you, you look just like her. Beautiful.”

  Summer blushed. “Thank you.”

  A nurse came in then. “Chief Flynn, time for your vitals. If you’d step out for a few minutes,” she told Cameron and Summer. “This won’t take long.”

  “All right,” Cameron said. “We’ll be just outside, Mickey.” Then, to the nurse, he said, “His heart rate might be up. He just got a shock.”

  From his bed, Mickey Flynn grinned.

  Cameron guided Summer from the room as the nurse wheeled her cart around.

  The door had barely closed behind them when Summer whirled around and was digging in her purse for her phone. “I cannot believe this!”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to use that here,” Cameron said indicating her cell phone.

  “Oh, I’m not making a call. I want to show him some pictures of Mom. She’s not going to believe this. Michael Flynn. The Michael Flynn. My parents’ romance was like something out of a fairy tale. We used to love hearing the story. It was so romantic that Dad came in and swept her off her feet.”

  “While breaking Mickey’s heart.”

  Summer stopped tapping on her phone and cast stricken eyes up at him. “I...I never thought about it from that perspective,” she said slowly.

  She stared down at the image of her mother, taken just a few weeks ago after church. Lovie was radiant in peach. Summer had liked the picture so much she’d had a print made of it.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t.”

  Cameron ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know, Summer. He hasn’t been that animated in...well, it seems like forever. May I see it?”

  She held out her mobile phone. The woman smiling back at him was, indeed, beautiful. He saw what Summer would look like in thirty years. He could also see what had caught Mickey’s eye all those years ago.

  The hospital door opened and the nurse came out. “Mr. Jackson, he’s asking to see you.”

  “I’ll go to the waiting room,” Summer said.

  Cameron looked torn, then he nodded. He watched Summer head down the hall, then he headed into the room.

  “Wow,” Mickey said.

  “Well, you look like you’re ready to be discharged.”

  Mickey grinned, and to Cameron it was like seeing the pre-cancer Mickey.

  “What a wonderful gift,” Mickey said. “Provident that it should come now.”

  Cameron wasn’t sure he wanted to know what Mickey meant by that. But he asked anyway.

  “I’m not fooling myself, Cam. And neither should you. Despite what you said, and it could be that you don’t even know it yourself, but you wouldn’t have brought ‘just a friend’ to see me. I’m on borrowed time. I made peace with that. What about you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you love her?”

  Cameron ran his hand through his hair again, the gesture one of mute irritation. “Mick, we’ve been out a couple of times. But love?” He gave a harsh little laugh. “You of all people should know there’s no way I’d get seriously entangled with someone like her.”

  Mickey’s snort of disgust turned into a cough. When Cameron moved toward him, Mickey waved him away.

  “Listen to you. Someone like her. That Melanie did a number on you,” he groused. “Don’t be like me, Cam. I loved Louvenia Gardner and spent the rest of my life wondering and regretting that I didn’t fight harder to keep her. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t let a good woman get away because you’re afraid of getting hurt.”

  He paused for a moment, either in reflection or to catch his breath, Cameron didn’t know which.

  And he didn’t like the connection Mickey was making between Summer and his ex-wife. The conversation with Summer about Melanie was still too fresh in his mind. Summer had told him she wasn’t Melanie, and now he was hearing it from Mickey, too.

  “I can’t get over how much she looks like her mother.”

  Cameron made a noise that could have been a grunt.

  “Well, there are three more just like her.”

  Mickey’s eyes widened. “Lovie has four daughters?”

  Cameron nodded. “I’ve met all but one of them. But the oldest is a doctor and the family resemblance between her and Summer is unmistakable.”

  Mickey smiled, apparently liking the idea.

  “I wonder
what she looks like now. She had blue eyes that I thought I’d drown in and legs that went on forever.”

  Mickey closed his eyes for a moment, and had what could only be described as a dreamy smile on his face.

  “Probably still is as much of a looker as she was back in the day,” Mickey murmured.

  “She is,” Cameron said.

  “So you’ve met the mother,” Mickey said without opening his eyes. “Things are progressing. That’s good.”

  Cameron shook his head. “I haven’t met Mrs. Darling. Summer has a picture on her phone.”

  Mickey sat up, apparently too fast because he sucked in his breath and leaned back in the bed.

  Cameron rushed to his mentor’s side. “Take it easy, Mick.”

  “Do you think... That picture...”

  “I’ll go get her,” Cameron said as he made sure Mickey was comfortable. “She went back to the waiting room.”

  A few minutes later he returned with Summer. Her astonishment about Mickey knowing her mother was as profound to witness as Mickey finding out his first love had four daughters.

  “Cam tells me that you have a picture of your mother on your phone,” Mickey said. “Would you mind...”

  Summer was already pulling her cell from her purse. “Of course,” she said. “This was just a few Sundays ago after church.”

  She had lots of photos on her phone, so Mickey looked at images of Summer and her sisters, but he kept returning to the one of Lovie Darling.

  Cameron watched his friend as he talked to Summer. And he saw what Summer didn’t see: the love shining in Mickey’s eyes as he looked at the picture of the woman he’d loved and lost.

  Cameron’s gaze shifted to Summer.

  She was telling him something about Spring, but Cameron was thinking about what Mickey had said. Cameron couldn’t help but wonder if he had let his ex-wife color his thinking so much that he’d let someone genuine and true slip away.

  * * *

  “I can’t wait to tell Mom about meeting Mr. Flynn,” Summer said as they were headed back to Cedar Springs. “What a small, small world it is.”

  “I take it they didn’t keep in touch through the years.”

  She shook her head. “Not to my knowledge. He seemed to be in really good spirits,” she said.

  “That was all you,” Cameron said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s nothing like a pretty woman to lift a man’s spirits, sick or otherwise.”

  She smiled. “Now who’s the flirt?”

  “I really am glad you came,” Cameron said.

  “Me, too. Mom is going to be stunned.”

  “Do you think she had any regrets?”

  Summer gave him a startled glance. “What do you mean?”

  “About what could have been. I mean between them, her and Mickey.”

  “If she did, she never gave any indication of it. She and my Dad were happy together, truly happy. Their marriage taught the four of us what it really meant to love and be loved. They lived and breathed their wedding vows.”

  Cameron thought about that as they headed home. Summer was the kind of woman a man could love for decades like Mickey had loved her mother. Cam wasn’t sure if he had it in him to love a woman like that.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Summer had a busy day ahead of her, but she could barely contain her excitement as she arrived at her mother’s house first thing in the morning. Through the years, Lovie had spoken about Michael Flynn with fondness, and she knew her mother would like to know about him.

  When she didn’t find Lovie in the kitchen or in her bedroom, she went to the intercom and called out. “Mom, where are you?”

  “In the solarium, honey,” came Lovie’s reply.

  Summer shook her head and smiled. Solarium. Only Lovie Darling would come up with a name like that for the covered walkway that connected the main house to Spring’s space. The addition to the house that had once served as her father’s medical practice had been converted into living space that Spring now called home.

  “Summer, bring that basket on the island counter.”

  Making her way through the house, Summer went to the kitchen and plucked up the small wicker basket her mother used for dried herbs. Lovie grew her own.

  A few moments later, she found her mother snipping greenery from the potted plants that practically filled the space.

  “It’s starting to look like a jungle in here,” she observed as she placed the basket near Lovie, who was bent over fresh mint. “Are you trying to completely close off the pathway so Spring can’t get through?”

  It sure looked like it. What used to be at least a four-foot wide limestone walkway leading from Lovie’s kitchen to the mud-room at Spring’s place was now a barely discernible path filled with large pots on the floor and on benches. A few spots remained where you could actually just sit amid the natural beauty. Flowers also grew in the space that could better be described as a greenhouse.

  “Spring accused me of the same thing,” Lovie said, dropping the mint into the basket and then straightening to hug her daughter. “You look lovely today, dear. That color becomes you.”

  Summer glanced down at the teal sundress. “Thanks,” she said. “I have one just like it in a color called ‘strawberry lemonade.’”

  Lovie grinned. “That sounds like a wonderful idea. Let’s go make some.” She placed her gloves and the basket on a bench and turned Summer back toward the kitchen. “I got fresh strawberries from Hannaford’s just yesterday. Of course, I got too many for just smoothies and dessert, so lemonade is the perfect solution.”

  As Lovie went about gathering sugar and lemons, Summer pulled out the juicer.

  “Mom, you are never going to guess who I met yesterday.”

  “I hope it was that nice Dr. Reveau. I think the two of you would hit it off marvelously.”

  Summer bit back a sigh. “No, Mom, it wasn’t Dr. Reveau. I met someone from your past.”

  Lovie opened the refrigerator and pulled out a pint of plump strawberries. “My past?”

  Summer nodded. “Your romantic past.”

  Lovie’s brow furrowed as she put the berries in a colander and ran cold water over them from the sink in the kitchen island. “I don’t have...”

  “I met Michael Flynn.”

  The colander clattered in the sink as it fell from Lovie’s hands. She looked as startled and dumbstruck as Mickey had when she walked into his hospital room.

  “What did you say?”

  “Michael Flynn. I met him last night in Durham.”

  Lovie’s hand went to her chest. “Oh, my,” she said bracing the other on the island as if for support. “Oh, my.”

  Alarmed, Summer went to her side.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m all right, honey. That’s just... Wow. That’s a name I haven’t thought about in years. He was such a nice man. I’m afraid I broke his heart.”

  The strawberries and lemonade forgotten, Lovie motioned Summer to sit in the breakfast nook with her.

  “Tell me all about it. How did you happen to meet him?”

  While Summer told her mother the story, she didn’t realize she’d also revealed her budding relationship with Cameron. It was a fact that didn’t escape Lovie.

  “So you’ve been dating this fireman?”

  Summer blushed. “Oh, he’s the fire chief for the city. And I, well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’re ‘dating.’”

  She didn’t want to talk about Cameron with her mother. She tried to turn Lovie’s thoughts back on Mickey Flynn.

  “I showed him your picture,” she said. “The one from church a few weeks ago. He said you’re even more beautiful now than you were then.”

  A wis
tful smile played across Lovie’s mouth. “Michael always knew the right thing to say.”

  Lovie took her daughter’s hand. Summer was surprised to discover how cold her mother’s hand was.

  “H-how ill is he, Summer?”

  She shook her head. “Cameron said he probably won’t leave the hospital. He’s got maybe a few weeks left. I’m sorry, Mom.”

  Lovie blinked back sudden tears. She patted Summer’s hand. “Let me go get something to show you.”

  When she returned a few minutes later, her eyes were decidedly redder than they’d been when she’d left.

  Even after all these years, Lovie maintained a soft spot for Michael Flynn. It was sweet. And, Summer thought, incredibly sad.

  As she watched Lovie settle back with an old scrapbook in her lap, Summer wondered if there was more to the story about Michael Flynn, Lovie Gardner and John Darling than her parents had ever revealed.

  “You okay, Mom?”

  Lovie nodded. She swallowed and then invited Summer closer.

  “Your father used to tease me about holding on to this,” Lovie said, opening the scrapbook, “but I couldn’t bear to part with it. I don’t believe in throwing away the past just because it’s over.”

  She turned to the first page and for the next hour, she and Summer relived via snapshots, concert ticket stubs and other memorabilia, including a few pressed flowers, the months when Lovie had been Michael Flynn’s girl.

  * * *

  The long visit with Mickey had taken a toll on Cameron. He was already tired, and the work day had been interminable. He’d hoped to get home to catch up on some sleep. But it was City Council meeting night, and even on good nights they tended to drag on.

  This one was bound to be even longer than usual. At least twenty citizens had signed up in advance to address the council during the public comments portion of the meeting. They typically had three to five people, two of them regulars who liked to admonish the council members and emergency managers about everything from litter to the height of grass in public greenways.

  It didn’t take a genius to suss out that all of those people were here tonight to oppose the development project.