Man of His Word

by Cynthia Reese

  But his next words?

  “Not much. I can’t tell you much at all.”

  Then her heart did a double beat as he leaned forward and asked, “But how about I show you?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  DANIEL PARKED HIS pickup in the slot marked Chief and glanced in the rearview mirror. Yep. There was the little Toyota, with the mom and the daughter, pulling up behind him. They’d tailgated him the whole ride back into town from the farm.

  He rubbed at a head that ached from too little sleep and too much sun. Between the new job and harvest time just gearing up, he felt as if he’d been run ragged.

  And now this.

  Blowing out a long breath, he opened the door. Gravel crunched under his foot, and behind him he heard the flags clanking against the pole. Wind was coming in from the west today, hot and dry. Unbidden, he found himself hoping there’d be no car fires on the interstate with such a stiff breeze.

  Slamming the door, he saw that the girl and the woman had gotten out, as well. What was the mom’s name? Kimberly? Yeah, Kimberly. She wasn’t what he’d expected. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Adoptive parents didn’t have to look like their kids.

  And Kimberly and Marissa didn’t match at all. Marissa had taken after Miriam, who’d been tall and had given Marissa her strawberry blond hair. Kimberly was slimmer and darker and much more petite. And she looked almost too young to be Marissa’s mother.

  But like Miriam, Kimberly possessed courage of a sort. Miriam had ginned up the courage and the fortitude to escape a dangerous situation, and he figured Kimberly had shown a similar bravery to tackle the red tape required to adopt a baby.

  “So it was here?” Kimberly asked him.

  Daniel tore his mind away from the razor-sharp memories of that day—ten years ago? No, eleven. Almost twelve, actually, this coming July Fourth.

  “Yes.” He found himself guarding his words. What could he tell them? What should he? Legally, he was in a bind, because Miriam was covered under Georgia’s safe-haven law. But more than that, he remembered the girl’s abject terror of her boyfriend’s parents finding out about Marissa.

  He’d given Miriam his word. And it was up to him to keep it.

  Beckoning for them to follow him, he walked out to the patch of lawn between the firehouse and the street. One of the crew had just mowed the grass, and it smelled fresh and green. Unlike that summer day, there was no redolent smell of charcoal and sizzling burgers from a July Fourth cookout by the crew, no shrieks from kids playing tag under sprinklers on the side yard.

  “She pulled up here,” Daniel told them. “She was driving an old four-door. I was standing...” He pivoted, replaying the day in his head. “There, leaned against the side of the building. Everybody else had gone inside to eat.”

  It was all fresh—the grief he’d felt over his dad not being with them on that day, the fact that he had angered and worried Ma with his sudden move to follow in his father’s footsteps as a firefighter, the last time his father had held his hand—his dad swathed in bandages, a mummy of a man in the burn unit.

  Take care of your brothers and your sisters and Ma.

  Keep your word, Danny, keep your word, no matter the cost.

  The last words his father had spoken to him, an entreaty wrung out of a man in agony, a man needing assurance that his eldest son would take his place as the family’s leader.

  And Daniel had promised his father that he would.

  On that July Fourth, he’d been bent on escaping the day’s festivities, and that was why he’d been the one to see Miriam.

  “What...sort of car?” Kimberly asked, behind him.

  The question pulled him away from his own tangled emotions of that day and into the present. “You know, it was old. Like a 1970s Nova? I remember it had about four different colors of paint on it.”

  Daniel turned back to face Marissa. Yes, she had Miriam’s red-gold hair, and it looked as though she was well on her way to achieving her biological mother’s height. Funny how they both twirled their long strawberry blond hair around their index fingers.

  Funny how he could remember that small habit of Miriam’s at all.

  “Is that why she dump—” Marissa broke off, apparently taking in the same look of exasperation that Daniel saw on Kimberly’s face. “Is that why she gave me up? Because she was poor?” Her words trembled with emotion.

  “She gave you up because she cared about you. Because she couldn’t figure out a way to keep you safe and still keep you, so she decided that keeping you safe was the better choice.” Daniel fought a strange sense of protectiveness for Miriam, as though even the little he’d shared somehow violated his promise to her. “I honestly don’t know if she was rich or poor or even if the car was hers. All I can say for a fact is that you were born here, in this spot, on July 4, 2003.”

  “I was born here? Right here? I thought...”

  “You were born on the Fourth, right?” Now Daniel worried that maybe they’d gotten confused, that maybe this wasn’t the same Marissa after all. No. No she was definitely Miriam’s child.

  “Yeah. I mean, yes, sir. People call me a firecracker baby. Because of my hair and being born on the Fourth and all...” Her face wrinkled as she said this, and her fingers settled for a moment on her hair and again twisted a strand of it. She didn’t sound too enthused about the moniker.

  Kimberly spoke up. “I didn’t know she was born here, either. The court papers said Marissa’s birth mother had tried to surrender her here at the fire station, and you were the firefighter who’d helped her. So...what can you tell us?” Kimberly asked. “What all do you remember? About that day?”

  This Daniel could do. He smiled. “I was out here, minding my own business, and then this car comes roaring up, and I go to check it out...” He closed his eyes. The memory was still so sharp he could smell the charcoal. “And there you were, Marissa. Busy getting born, all on your own. You didn’t even wait for the EMTs, and they were inside.” He jabbed a finger over his shoulder to indicate the firehouse.

  Again memories flooded him: the sweet weight of Marissa in his arms, the goofy feeling that swamped him as he held her.

  The agony of having to turn her over to the child-welfare folks. At the hospital, he’d asked if he could keep her for a while, just in case Miriam changed her mind and came back for her daughter, but they said no, certainly not.

  The “certainly not” had stuck in his craw. Miriam had trusted him. Why couldn’t they?

  But there were laws and regulations and he knew that he really couldn’t raise Marissa on his own. So he’d made them promise that she would be placed in a good home.

  Daniel had kissed the top of Marissa’s little red head and handed her over, and that was the last time he’d seen her.

  Until now.

  And the mom they’d picked out for Marissa did look like a pretty good mom. Kimberly was pretty, and seemed caring. He noticed the furrow in her brow as she fretted silently over Marissa. She was worried. But she wasn’t saying anything, just giving Marissa time to absorb what Daniel had told her.

  “Really? You remember?” Marissa asked. Again, there was a tremor in her voice.

  “As if it was yesterday.”

  He tore his gaze away from the girl’s face, her expression so unreadable that he couldn’t be sure if what he was saying was helping or hurting. Daniel turned to look at Kimberly.

  Now, she was an open book. Her eyes, that curious blue, were bright with unshed tears. Her throat was working, and he could tell she was moved by the moment.

  Had to be hard, helping her adopted daughter revisit the day she came into the world. Did Kimberly envy that mother? Envy the chance to have given birth to Marissa herself? Or was she afraid that Marissa would leave her in search of her birth mom?

  “I have a picture,” he said, his voice husky.

  “A picture?” The words exploded from both Marissa and Kimberly. They stared at each other, their eyes wide with excitement.
>
  “Can we see it?” Kimberly asked.

  “Yeah. Sure. Come on. It’s in my office.”

  Inside, Marissa glanced around the tiny office, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Kimberly was more patient, and he noticed how she laid a light hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Its fluttering movement seemed to comfort the clearly anxious Marissa.

  He grabbed up the photo of him and Marissa and extended it to her. “See? I told you that you were tiny.”

  She stared down. “Oh.” Disappointment was plain on her face. “I thought...I thought it would be of me and my birth mom.”

  But Kimberly had taken the photo from Marissa and was staring down at it. She traced her finger over the image, her mouth softly parted. A tear snaked down her cheek, and Daniel liked the way she let it be.

  She looked up at Daniel. “This is you. With Marissa.”

  “Yeah. The guys took it. Right before I had to hand her over. DFCS said they’d find her a good home. Looks as if they did. I mean, I asked if I could keep you,” he blurted out to Marissa, “but I mean, who was I kidding. I was a twenty-five-year-old unmarried guy, a rookie firefighter. Who was gonna trust me with a kid, huh?”

  Marissa’s eyebrows skyrocketed. “My mom was twenty-five when she adopted me. And she was single.”

  Something about that twisted in him. He shot a questioning look toward Kimberly, and she nodded. “Yeah, but, Marissa, at first I was just a foster parent. Besides, I’d already gone through all the foster-care paperwork and the classes, and they’d done a home study. Plus...you were listed as a special-needs baby. They needed somebody who would take you, no questions asked.”

  “Yeah. I forgot about all that.” She leaned over her mother’s shoulder and studied the photo. “Hey, I was kinda cute. I thought babies were ugly.”

  “You were beautiful. Tiny. But beautiful. Except...” Daniel scratched his head as he recalled the bruises he’d left on her pale pink skin. Other bruises, that the EMTs shrugged off, had started popping up, as well. Part of the birthing process, they’d assured him.

  Just then the “ennnh” of the fire alarm’s buzzer reverberated through the building, and the radio crackled to life. He listened, took in the bare facts: multicar accident on the interstate, gas-tank leak, trapped driver.

  “Sorry,” he told Kimberly and Marissa. “This will have to wait.”

  And then he was out the door, trying to focus on the fire call, the person trapped in the vehicle, that dry westerly breeze that could make fires on the interstate get out of hand with hair-raising speed.

  But as he pulled on the last of his turnout gear and swung into the station’s extended cab pickup with his captain at the wheel, he caught sight of Kimberly and Marissa’s faces.

  His gaze fixed on their expressions as Dave, his captain, peeled out behind the fire engine.

  Marissa’s was typical tweenager, like his nieces and nephews, her eyes alive with curiosity and excitement.

  Kimberly? Her fingers went to her mouth, her brow creased ever so slightly and her eyes were dark with worry as they locked with his. She knew the life. The risks. The fact that even with routine calls, there were never any guarantees.

  He didn’t know how Kimberly knew, but her eyes held that same look that Ma’s had every time his dad had left the table to answer a call.

  And he didn’t know how he felt about having someone he’d barely met worrying that much about him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “YOU’RE SURE YOU don’t mind waiting?” Kimberly asked Marissa as they sat on the front bench in front of the fire station. They’d passed some of the time in the chief’s office, but the cramped confines had seemed to make Marissa more restless, so Kimberly had suggested a change of scene. “The secretary said that it could take a while.”

  “I wish I could have gone with them!” Marissa enthused. “You know, see them cut the car up. Mrs. Karen—” she jabbed a finger back toward the station and the secretary’s office “—she said they had to use the Jaws of Life. Man, wouldn’t that be cool, Mom? To see them save somebody’s life?”

  Kimberly shuddered. She’d already picked up enough of the garbled radio traffic to understand that the woman driver was in critical condition and that the extrication was taking longer than Daniel had anticipated.

  No, when she thought about the accident, all Kimberly could picture was Marissa trapped in that car, critically injured, dying—it could have been them on that very interstate. She shook herself and purposefully focused her mind away from the grim vision and onto appreciating her good fortune.

  Maybe they should leave and come back. Daniel would likely be tired and not in the mood for pesky questions when he returned. And wouldn’t he have loads of paperwork? She needed him to be as cooperative as possible so that she could pick up any facts that might lead her to Marissa’s birth mother. It was important.

  No. She thought again about that woman trapped in the car. It was critical to find Marissa’s birth mother.

  “Maybe I could be a firefighter, huh, Mom?” Beside her, Marissa bounced with excitement. “It’s a rush, don’t you think? I mean, you’re sitting here, or maybe washing the truck, and then, boom! You’ve got to fight a fire or get somebody out of a building—”

  Kimberly didn’t say the first thing that popped into her mind as Marissa burbled on. She didn’t point out, not even gently, that there was no way a doctor would ever approve Marissa for a job as risky as a firefighter...or a police officer or a soldier or astronaut—any of the adrenaline-buzzing careers that Marissa gravitated toward. Maybe her daughter said she wanted to be those things because Kimberly had pointed out that they just weren’t possible—and not because she was a girl, but because...

  The rumble of the fire engine around the curve tugged her thoughts back to Daniel.

  He did look weary when he slid out of the cab of the truck. His face was smeared with soot, his turnout jacket loosened to reveal a grimy white T-shirt.

  “You’re still here,” he observed as his boots hit the concrete driveway.

  “Yeah, you said— We waited.” Now Kimberly was doubly uncertain about her decision. “But we can come back. I expect you’re tired and you—”

  “Hey, Chief! Did you save her?” Marissa interjected. “Is she okay? The woman in the car?”

  “They airlifted her to Macon. I think she’s got a good shot.” Daniel’s face brightened as he shifted to face Marissa.

  “That is so cool! I wish I could have been there!”

  “You sound like my niece. She’s determined to be a firefighter when she grows up. Gives my mother a heart attack every time she mentions it.”

  Kimberly couldn’t help but admire the way Daniel was so patient and careful with Marissa. Maybe the fact that he had a niece explained it? Or maybe...maybe he still felt a connection with the baby girl he’d saved all those years ago?

  “Should we come back?” Kimberly asked him, trying to gauge his willingness to talk with them.

  He shook his head. “No. No, you’ve waited all this time. But can I have a few minutes to grab a shower? You wouldn’t want to be cooped up with me in my condition right now.”

  Marissa spoke up again. “Can I help your firefighters some way? I mean, you’ve got to get things cleaned or organized or...something, right?”

  Daniel chuckled, and Kimberly tried not to roll her eyes. This was the same girl who thought unloading the dishwasher every morning was equivalent to torture.

  “Sure.” He called over his shoulder to a firefighter—a woman, Kimberly noted. “Bobbi, show this probie how to check the hoses.”

  “You got it, Chief,” Bobbi told him.

  Then he turned to Kimberly. “Five minutes? You can wait in my office if you’d like.”

  It was more like ten minutes when he joined Kimberly. His hair was damp and curling, a droplet of water still clinging to the lock that brushed his forehead, but he looked less tired and more refreshed.

  “Now, where were
we? Oh, yeah, the picture.” He picked up the photo, which Kimberly had placed on his desk after his hasty departure.

  “Can I—can I get a copy of this?” Kimberly asked him. “It’s a gorgeous photo. I’d love to have one, that is, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure.” He nodded, and the droplet of water on his dark hair flew off. “I can scan it and email it to you, or I can go over to Walmart and get a copy made. How long are you going to be in town?”

  “Er...that depends. We’re trying to track down Marissa’s birth mother. So if we can find her and talk with her, then we’ll probably be leaving fairly soon.”

  “Oh, no. You...” Daniel worked his mouth, as if he was choosing his words carefully.

  “I mean, you can tell us, right? Where to find her?” Kimberly scooted to the edge of the hard plastic chair, her stomach full of fluttering anxiety.

  “She’s been in touch with you?” Daniel asked instead of giving her the positive answer she had been hoping for.

  “No. We knew about this place...and you...” She swept a hand to encompass the fire station. “And it was the only real clue we had, so we started here.”

  “I’m afraid this is a dead end, then,” Daniel told her. “I can’t tell you any more than I already have. I did tell you that I didn’t know your daughter’s birth mother. Didn’t I?”

  “You said that, but... I mean, if you thought back, you could remember details. And surely she mentioned her name.” Kimberly hated the way her voice went up a half octave, that she was practically begging.

  Daniel did a double take. His next words were loaded with patient forbearance that somehow managed to irk Kimberly even more than if he’d snapped at her. “Look, I know you’ve come all this way—I guess it’s a long way?”

  “Atlanta. We live in Sandy Springs, actually.”

  “Yeah, that’s, what? Two and a half, three hours?” At her nod, he went on, “Yeah, a bit of a road trip. Like I was saying, you’ve come all this way, but I don’t think I can help you. I’ve pretty much told you what I can.”