One Hot Summer

by Melissa Cutler

  He turned in time to watch the ambulance doors close with Granny June inside. Ty Briscoe was putting up a fight again, though Decker was doing his best to restrain him. Stripped of his cockiness, Ty was just a worried son, like any of the hundreds Micah had seen throughout his career.

  “Let me ride with her. I’m her son,” Ty said.

  “I can’t let you do that, but she’s in good hands, I can guarantee you,” Micah said. “My men are taking her to the Tri-City Memorial Hospital. Close by. You can meet her there.”

  “I’ll drive you and the rest of the family,” Decker said. “Let’s get moving so we can follow them directly.”

  Decker, Carina, her sister, Haylie, and Ty’s wife lit off across the lawn, but Ty lingered. “Is she going to be all right?” he asked in that same scared voice Micah had heard from so many loved ones over his years working as a first responder.

  “Hard to say, given her age, but if anyone can pull out of this, it’s June. You’re lucky that the fire roads held so the fire didn’t spread to the resort or the woods. This could’ve been a whole lot worse.”

  “And the hydrants you insisted we get—” Ty said.

  The mention of hydrants brought Micah right back to how pissed off he’d been during the grand battle between the two of them over their installation. “You mean the ones you fought me on every step of the way? Doesn’t seem like such a waste of money anymore, does it?”

  Ty’s face was stripped of any ego, any pride. “No. It doesn’t.”

  Micah knew his adrenaline was responsible for the way his anger was whipping up as potently as a firestorm, but he couldn’t find it in himself to hold back any longer. “And it’s not only me you’ve been jerking around. You’ve been fighting the whole fire department for years trying to tie our hands and limit our power. Don’t you see? This time we saved your mother, but when someone’s trapped in a fire it’s always someone’s mother. It’s always someone’s loved one.”

  Ty screwed his face up in anguish. “You win.”

  Micah just about cracked wide open like a volcano with that asinine pronouncement. “It wasn’t about that. It’s never about that for me or my crew. You’re the only one who thinks all this is a game.”

  “I don’t want to be your enemy!” Ty shouted. “No more fighting your burn bans or regulations. I have too much to lose.”

  Micah’s attention shifted to Remedy, who was sitting up, looking stronger by the minute, while Chet held a stethoscope to her lungs. “We all do.”

  “Thank you for saving my mother.”

  Micah shook the hand Ty extended. “It was my honor.”

  Ty turned away.

  “Hey!” Micah called after him. “She’s going to be okay. She’s too strong not to be.”

  Ty gave a terse nod, then jogged after the rest of his family.

  The lawn and parking lots were jammed with firefighter vehicles from all over Central Texas. The fire looked close to containment. Micah would let the other crews handle that. There was only one thing on his mind. Remedy.

  Standing apart from the crowd, he allowed a small storm of feelings to swell up inside him. She’d nearly died. He would never forget the way she looked on the chapel floor, crawling to safety, Granny June on her back. The conviction in her eyes, the strength. His own profound relief at finding them, of not being too late.

  He shed his jacket and wiped his sweaty, soot-covered face on his sleeve, getting a grip again. When he reached her, all those feelings came exploding up to the surface again. He braced tight fists on either side of her hips so she wouldn’t see how his limbs shook. He locked his watery gaze to hers.

  She took down her oxygen mask and stroked her hands through his hair. He jerked his head away.

  “Could you give us a minute?” he told Chet.

  “Only a minute, though. We’re gonna get her to the hospital for a more thorough exam.”

  When Chet and the other EMTs had cleared out, Micah forgot everything he’d been prepared to say. It was all too much. The hurt, the fury, the fear that nothing he did would ever be enough to keep everyone he loved safe. “What happened? The fire looks like it may have started at Granny’s bench. Was that it? Was it her candle for Tyson that did it?”

  “I was driving the golf cart. Granny wanted to chase the homing pigeons and we were having so much fun. I crashed the golf cart into her bench. The candle knocked over. Her drink and the second drink she had sitting there both knocked over. And the rest happened so fast.” She closed her eyes. “So damn fast.”

  “You should have waited for a fire crew to arrive.”

  “When Granny June ran in the chapel I knew I couldn’t wait for someone else to go in after her. And then, with the smoke and the heat in there, I couldn’t get Granny to leave and I was tired. I wanted to give up, but I put you in my mind. I had to get back to you, Micah, because I love you. There was no other choice but to see you again.”

  “And here we are,” he bit out. “Granny June unconscious and you in the back of an ambulance and a lot of lives risked.” Her shoulders sagged, but he couldn’t dwell on that. “You almost left me today.” His tone came out sounding harsher than he’d meant, and maybe she could have mistaken it for anger if not for the roughness charged in each word.

  “I had to save Granny June.”

  “You should have waited for me and the other firefighters to go get her. That was reckless and irresponsible, and just like you to pull that crazy shit without thinking it through to the consequences.”

  Her face screwed up, angry and hurt. “I know.”

  “Lay off her or get away from my ambulance,” Chet said. “She’s been through enough.”

  A small voice in Micah’s mind told him Chet was right, but the rest of him was tired of holding back, tired of the constant trouble she caused for him. “The worst part is that it’s my fault, really. I never said anything to Granny June about those candles she burned. I was too busy getting her advice about romancing you. Same as the ballroom fire. That’s on me, too. I told you the first time we slept together that I wasn’t going to let you interfere with my job, but that was exactly what I went and did. I let you get into my head and cloud my reasoning. The ballroom fire, the choices I made to authorize that damned dessert and those flammable trees and those dogs—all that nonsense—put hundreds of lives at risk. And for what?”

  “I cosigned every authorization that night, too, man,” Chet said.

  The hurt tasted thick and bitter as mud in Micah’s throat. “How dare you sashay into town with your trust fund safety net in place and wreck my life and the lives of so many others? Wynd offered you a job in Hollywood and I think you need to take it.”

  The devastation on her face nearly brought him to his knees. He girded himself and held steady.

  She looked at Micah, then past him, to her parents, who’d crossed over the barricades and were fast approaching the ambulance.

  “Chet, am I clear to go? Can Micah or my parents drive me to the hospital?”

  Chet shook his head. “I’m not comfortable with that. I want to keep you on oxygen and an IV.”

  “Let her go if she wants to go. That’s what I’ve had to learn the hard way,” Micah bit out.

  Tears dripped down her eyes. “I love you with all my heart,” she said.

  He couldn’t listen to that anymore. He couldn’t listen to anything else except his instinct, and right now his instinct was telling him to let her go and leave good enough alone. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Hey!” Chet called to him. Micah turned around. “You’re a fucking idiot,” Chet said.

  He blinked at Chet, trying to think of something biting to say, something that would wound, but his brain had gone numb. Turning on his boot heel, he stalked to his truck.

  Time to make his way to the hospital to check on June, instead of brooding about a relationship that was doomed from the get-go.

  A hand pulled on his shoulder. Micah whirled, his fist up, ready to st
rike. “Not in the mood, Chet.”

  It wasn’t Chet but Xavier who faced him, his fists at the ready. “You can hit me if it makes you feel better, but you know I’d hit you back.”

  All the steam leached out of Micah. Of all the people who could’ve shown up in that moment, Xavier was the only one with the power to talk him down off the ledge. He let Xavier pull him into a tight hug. “How’d you know to come here?”

  “Alex called,” Xavier said, backing up to clasp both of Micah’s shoulders. “In his first call he nearly gave me a heart attack when he told me you’d run into a burning building that hadn’t been contained yet. I was already on my way when he called again to tell me that not only were you safe, but you’d saved Remedy and June.”

  Micah huffed. “Then I’m guessing you watched that fight. She’s leaving, you know. She got a job offer in L.A. It was the offer she’d been waiting for. She’s outta here.”

  “Sounded to me like you practically guaranteed that.”

  Micah rolled his neck. “I don’t need you to rag on me right now.”

  “She’s the best thing that ever happened to you.”

  Like hell she was. “She brings out the worst in me.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Yes, he was sure. “She drives me to distraction; she compromises my professional integrity. Because of her, Ty threatened my job, my crew hates me, and I’m responsible for two major fires at the resort in the past month. Not a bunch of rich, entitled punks, but me, Xavier. It’s like everything I worked for all these years was a lie. I thought if I could control it, if I could just get the resort to comply with the law, that I could keep everyone safe. And God’s trying to tell me over and over again that it’s not true. That he didn’t give me that gift after all. It was only foolish pride.”

  Xavier shook Micah’s shoulders and drilled him with a piercing stare. “I want you to listen to me, man. And listen good. Your mom would’ve left your family anyway.”

  “What the hell are you talking about her for? This has nothing to do with her.”

  But Xavier didn’t seem to hear him. He shook Micah’s shoulders again. “Shut up and listen. She would’ve left your family and she would’ve left your father with or without the fire happening. Maybe not as soon as she did because of the fire, but leaving was in her bones. It was never your fault. It wasn’t the fire’s fault or your dad’s fault. Some people are just the leaving kind.”

  Exactly. Some people had it in their blood to leave.

  In a flash of memory, he was twelve, waking up in the morning and finding that note on the kitchen table. She’d had to know Micah would be the one who found it. She’d had to. He was always the first person up in the morning. He’d taken that as a sign that it was his job to go bring her home, maybe even before anyone else in the family realized she’d left, to spare everyone else the heartache that he felt.

  He would never forget the panic of not being able to get his dad’s truck started. It took him nearly ten minutes to figure out he had to put the clutch in for the engine to turn over. He would never forget the hair-raising grind of gears with every awkward gearshift. He would never forget his determination to save his family from this new horror. Even back then, he’d fancied himself a hero.

  Tears pricked his eyes. It had all been a lie, all that hope and optimism. What a waste. He’d driven that truck in circles around the town, then the county. He’d driven until he’d run out of gas and been forced to trudge to the nearest gas station to beg a quarter for a phone call.

  He tore away from Xavier’s hold and smacked his palms against his eyes to rid them of the unwanted tears. “You know who else is the leaving kind? Remedy.”

  Her name crushed his heart, splintering it into a million shards that would never be put back together again. He turned his back to Xavier and braced his hands on his truck while he fought to neutralize his expression.

  Behind him, Xavier gave a hard laugh. “So in that big, stupid, redneck brain of yours you figured you’d push her away before she could leave you?”

  She was leaving regardless of anything he did or said. So he’d beat her to the punch, big deal. Didn’t change the facts. “Stop drawing connections where there aren’t any. This is about Remedy not belonging in Texas. It’s about her not belonging with me.”

  “No. This is about you being afraid to take a chance on losing another person that you love from your life.”

  “I said stop it with the psychobabble bullshit.”

  But Xavier persisted. “The chapel fire is only going to take Remedy away if you use it to push her away. Not like the fire that took your mom away, and that took me and my family away from you.”

  Micah had a protest on the tip of his tongue, then stopped, considering Xavier’s point. He’d never thought about the Knolls Canyon Fire from that angle. That single event had stripped so many fundamental parts of his life away from him. His home, his mother, his best friend. “But we’re still friends; the fire didn’t take you from me.”

  “It took me far enough away that you and I were never the same,” Xavier answered in a quieter voice. “We had to reinvent what it meant to be friends and that took a long time. It took until we were adults to really figure it out.”

  “But we did.”

  “Yes, because that’s what people who love each other do. They figure out a way.”

  Micah dropped his chin to his chest. That’s what people who love each other do. Why did that statement hurt so much? After all these years, how did his mother’s lack of love still carry with it such a crippling bite? If she’d loved him, if she’d loved her family, she would have found a way to stay.

  “You are not the leaving kind, Micah. But right now, the way it stands with Remedy, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re the one leaving her. Where’s the man who sacrifices everything—even at the risk of his own heartache—to be there for the people he loves? Where’s my friend?”

  Well, shit. Xavier was right. Micah wasn’t the leaving kind. He was the go-for-broke idiot with the hero complex who gave his everything to the people he loved. Why would he change who he was now, after everything?

  He whirled around. “I screwed things up with Remedy.”

  “Yeah.”

  Panic rattled through him like an earthquake. “How do I make this right? What do I say to her?”

  “You don’t need anybody to tell you that because nobody else knows her like you do.”

  True enough.

  He tried to pour into his hug to Xavier everything he didn’t know how to say, how relieved he was that the two of them had found their way back to their friendship after the fire, how much it meant to him to be the godfather of Xavier’s children, how much he couldn’t bear to live without him. “I really do love you, man.”

  Xavier clasped Micah’s shoulders and shook him. “You’re telling the wrong person that tonight. Go get her before she’s gone. You don’t want to have to chase her all the way out to California.”

  That he did not.

  Chet was standing at the rear of an empty ambulance.

  “Where is she?” Micah said.

  “She pulled her IV out and took off when I wasn’t looking. The sheriff’s department and her parents are out looking for her now.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. I’m waiting for their call to come get her again so she can get the treatment she needs.”

  Micah tore through the streets of Dulcet in a blur, his siren and lights on, fielding phone call after phone call from worried townsfolk as he drove, every last one of those calls telling him exactly where Remedy had fled to.

  When he got to Petey’s Diner, he saw Remedy through the window right away, alone at a table in the far corner of the room. Barbara was behind the counter, absentmindedly wiping a glass and watching Remedy eat a burger with downcast eyes.

  Micah had seen enough. He pulled the door open and went to her.

  At the sight of him, she set down the partially eaten
burger on her plate and swallowed hard. Her eyes were filled with pain and he hated himself in that moment, knowing he was the cause.

  “You were right,” she said, her voice cracking. “This is a terrible cheeseburger. No offense to Petey.”

  His relief was a living, breathing force that swept through him faster than a wildfire. He pulled out a chair. “Now you know for sure that Hog Heaven’s burgers are the best in Texas.”

  Her gaze slid into the distance. “How did you know where to find me?”

  She rubbed her arms. It was all he could do not to wrench her hands away and hold them in his own.

  “Dusty saw you and called me. And then Delinda, and Tabby, and then Petey himself.”

  “Like I’ve said. Everybody is in everybody’s business in this town,” Remedy said.

  “And thank goodness for that, because then I knew where to find you so I could say what I have to say.”

  She rolled her focus to him. Those red-rimmed eyes killed him. He would never, ever forget the hurt he’d caused her. “You already said it,” she said.

  No, he most certainly did not. “I was wrong. About what I said to you earlier, and about a lot of things. It turns out that being afraid of having people taken from you because of forces beyond your control is something that sticks with you, even when you don’t know that it has.”

  He swallowed hard. “My mother…” How could he explain it to her? “It’s a funny thing about loss; you think it teaches you what’s really important. That’s what they tell you. You’re supposed to learn that a house isn’t a home; family’s your home. Or that material possessions are meaningless, and all that talk, but you know what? That house was my home. And I lost it, forever. And Xavier was my next-door neighbor and my blood brother, but I lost him for a long time, too. My mother was my family, and I lost her.

  “None of that was my fault—and I know that now—and I think I even knew that then, but I guess it didn’t register all the way into my DNA, because it didn’t stop me from growing up to believe I had the power to stop more loss, more fires. That if I just tried hard enough and fought tirelessly I would never again have to worry—no, to fear—losing what mattered to me. Stupid, right?”