by Lila Ashe
Now, tucked into the chair at the store, watching her mother help a tourist decide between penguin and kitten salt shakers, she was glad she’d learned that early. The pain rose again, sinking into her skin like broken glass sank into her bike tires.
Caz.
Somewhere in the last three months, during the code-three runs to asthma attacks and code-two runs for pizza and ice cream, during his silences and his surprised barks of laughter, under his watchful eyes that warmed when he didn’t know it, she’d been falling in love.
Love.
She’d honestly thought those afternoons when her stomach wouldn’t settle, when her insides wouldn’t stop flipping around like a dying fish, that she was becoming lactose intolerant. She gave up milk in her coffee, cheese for her burgers, and even went a whole week without ice cream.
Then she’d had him, and lost him, and only after he was gone did she realize what her sickness was.
Love.
What a stupid thing for a person, perfectly reasonable in every other way, to feel.
Her mother finished with the customer, and tottered back to her chair, ploomp-ing down and kicking off her heels. She patted her blond curls into place. Then she faced Bonnie, her eyes kind. For the first time, Bonnie could see Gramma Honor in her mother’s gaze. When had her mother developed those lines across her forehead? When had she gotten those deep laugh lines at her mouth?
“Did you tell him how you feel?”
Bonnie felt color suffuse her face. No. No more crying. Her head hurt. No wonder she never cried. It was awful. Her mouth was full of salt, and her eyes felt too puffy to fully close.
“I don’t know how I feel.”
“Oh, sugar. You don’t?”
Love, love, love. The word reverberated in her mind, in her heart, in her very blood, it seemed.
If she could swallow her tears, she could push this down.
Couldn’t she? “I can’t tell him.”
“You’ll have to at some point.”
“No.” She shook her head, ignoring the pain in it. “I’ll just fix it.”
Her mother sighed. “Oh, my little fixer. You can’t fix a broken heart like you can fix a broken bone.”
“Sure I can.” She could set it, keep it firmly in place, and let no one come near it for…for forever if that’s the way it had to be.
Her mother’s phone jingled with a text. She glanced at it. “Your father wants to know what he can do to help.”
“You told him?”
Her mother looked guilty. “I’m worried about you.”
Bonnie shook her head. It was bad enough her mother had seen her cry. If she accidentally teared up in front of her father, she’d probably have to kill herself with one of the penguin salt shakers from the front window. “No. He can’t help.”
Another cheery jingle from her mother’s phone. Marge tilted her head. “Cheesy fries on bacon burgers for lunch? He’ll bring them here.”
Again, Bonnie shook her head, but her stomach grumbled, giving her away. “Oh, fine.”
Her mother smiled and tapped a response.
Emotions. Ugh. Bonnie sure as heck didn’t want this…this incredible weight she felt inside her heart, as if it had been taken out of her chest, stomped on, and then chucked back inside, dirt and all.
Bonnie leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Then she wrapped her arms around her stomach. At least she felt hollow enough inside that she’d have some place to store this ridiculous pain.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Table sixteen is complaining their soup is cold,” Bonnie said frantically to Lexie. “What should I do? Nuke all their bowls? Eight of them will take forever, and then the first bowl will be cold again. Whose idea was it to do soup anyway?”
Lexie, cheerfully stirring a huge bowl of Caesar salad, said, “Tell them it’s meant to be cold. It’s French. Vichyssoise.”
“I thought it was tomato basil.”
“Whatever. Make them buy it. Go. Shoo!”
The enormous apparatus bay at Station One had been cleared out, and all the rigs—the engine, the spare, the truck and the ambulance—were parked in the lot next door, ready to roll out if needed. Thirty tables stood under the soaring metal roof. Each table was covered with white tablecloths and fresh flowers from the farmer’s market, bought that morning. The overhead lights, normally so glaringly bright, were turned off, and the whole room was glittering in candlelight. There had been a plan to have the bay doors open if it had been a warm night, but it was cold and rainy, so the doors were shut, the heaters were on, and the rain pounding down provided accompaniment to the laughter that filled the room.
It was, in a word, romantic.
Bonnie hated it.
Her eyes, horrible things that they were, couldn’t stay off stupid Caz. He looked incredible, like a model posing for a firefighter calendar. All the guys wore their utility pants and house Tshirts with their station numbers on the back. On a lot of the older guys, the brown leather suspenders looked ridiculous as they bowed around the belly and crossed in back.
On Caz, though? Bonnie had almost tripped over her own boots when she’d seen him in the kitchen. He was freshly shaven, and he smelled great. He smelled different. Usually he smelled of soap and something more woodsy, like his shampoo was made of bark and rosemary. But tonight he smelled…expensive. Exactly the way he’d smelled the night he cooked for her at the ranch. As if he were on a date.
Which he decidedly was not. And certainly not with her.
He’d made it crystal clear that he had no interest in her. Whatsoever.
He hadn’t called the next day. Or the next. When Bonnie had seen him at work two days later, his eyes had been clear, as if nothing had happened. “Hey, Bonnie,” he’d said without meeting her eyes as they did the rig precheck. “How’s it going?”
It was a question that didn’t require an answer, though she’d stammered one anyway. “F-fine.”
“Good, that’s good. Do you know if they restocked the drugs last night?”
It was more than he usually said to her in the mornings.
But Bonnie wasn’t glad he was talking. She was hurt and angry and sad and every time she figured out one emotion, she felt a new, different one, sweeping through her like the rain storms outside.
For two weeks, Bonnie had hidden everything by being uber-professional. Except for a kid call when they’d had to work hard together (the kid, who’d fallen off a three-story roof, had made it, thank God), they hadn’t touched. They didn’t bring up the night they’d spent together. They didn’t talk about anything real, actually. Just the weather (fine, a little rainy), the workload (kind of busy, huh?), and who would drive (no, you go ahead). In the kitchen, Caz was quicker to laugh, and had even offered a couple of jokes of his own. The guys were starting to relax a bit around him.
That actually made her feel worse.
So tonight, she’d asked Lexie to assign her far away from whatever he ended up doing for the fundraiser, and with a sympathetic look, Lexie had agreed. “You still have to play Truth or Dare. That went out on all the fliers. It’s Chief Barger with Tox, you with Caz.”
“Fine,” Bonnie had said. “I just don’t want to serve drinks with him.” Of course, that hadn’t stopped her from trying to look as good as she could while still being in uniform. She wore a pair of utility pants she hadn’t put on in a while because they’d always been a bit too small. She hadn’t been eating with as much gusto as she usually did the last couple of weeks, and the pants fit her like a glove. Her T-shirt was brand new, dark blue, and fit her like second skin. Her suspenders bowed slightly to the sides of her B-cups, and she’d had Donna at the salon put bright highlights in her hair so her bob gleamed almost platinum. She’d done her makeup carefully, using a YouTube tutorial on “smoky eyes.” To her astonishment, when she’d stepped back from the mirror, her eyes really had looked smudged, as if she’d put soot on her lashes, as if coal had streaked her eyes. As the standby medic at house fires,
she’d seen her own face covered in fire soot plenty of times, and that had never been a good look for her. This, though… She looked like someone else. Someone prettier than she normally was.
Which was good. She’d seen it in Caz’s eyes, over a table full of flowers and candles—he thought she looked good. She could tell it by the way he skated his eyes over her, down her body and back up again—greedily—as if he shouldn’t be looking, as if he were stealing something from her that he shouldn’t take.
And then he’d gone back to serving his table without smiling, without even waving a friendly hello.
Bonnie flew past hurt, confused, and sad, heading straight for mad. Good. At least I’m working him out of my system. She thumped another salad on Pastor Jacob’s table and apologized when a tomato went flying.
The rest of the night flowed smoothly, thanks to Lexie and Coin’s arrangements. Laughter tinkled from every table, and the wine (donated from Valentine’s Forget-Me-Not winery, of course) flowed heavily. The serving firefighters didn’t drink, of course (even though they were off-duty, they were still in uniform), but plenty of Bonnie’s coworkers were in attendance as guests, dressed to the nines. The rest of the town was there, too, all of them in fancy finery—the mayor wore a peacock blue dress with sequins, and the city manager was in a tuxedo. The two richest couples in town—the ones who had built their enormous estates up in the hills—were there, the women wearing dresses that probably cost more than Bonnie’s racing bike, and both the homeless Petes were in attendance, too, both of them with huge smiles and wearing rather grubby suits that didn’t fit.
Lexie got on stage, still dressed in her Fire Truck, Stay Back 100 Feet apron. She led them through the courses of the meal, all locally sourced, and introduced the director of the Darling Bay Alzheimer’s Support Initiative, who talked during the dinner itself. It was quiet while he spoke, only the clink of silverware floating above his words.
“This is the crisis we’re not doing enough about. This is what many of us in this room face, with either ourselves or our loved ones destined to end in long-term dementia care. Every medic in this room knows what I’m talking about.” David Green gripped the podium and leaned forward like a minister preaching to his flock. “They’ve been to the other care homes, the ones who lock their Alzheimer’s patients in zones they can’t break out of, and then just leave them to fade out, alone. Caring Village is a different model, and it’s the only one we’re backing, and we hope you will, too.” He gestured to the PowerPoint displayed on the screen next to him. “You’ve seen the layout of the grounds. It will accommodate a hundred patients for the first year, which is only a small start, but at least it’s a start. You see here, where this little grocery store is? It’ll be stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables, and the cashier will be a nurse. Over here, at the post office, patients will be able to post and pick up mail if they want to, and we’ll ferry it back and forth to the real post office in Darling Bay. The cafeteria is staffed by nurses dressed as food workers. See these four bus benches? They’re one of the most popular things in the Swedish models we’re copying—our patients will be able to wait for the bus which will be driven by another caretaker, ride around the ‘town’ a few times, and then get off where they like, still in Caring Village. They can ride all day if they want to, or they can sit on the bench and never get on.”
Mr. Bartle had been one of Bonnie’s favorite patients until he’d died the year before. A Houdini in striped pajamas, he could break out of his locked unit as easily as sneezing. Twice they’d been called by police in nearby towns when he’d been found, lost and wandering. The need for independent travel was one of Mr. Bartle’s last desires to be forgotten, and if he’d been able to get on a bus safely and ride it for a while, things would have been so much simpler.
Bonnie wondered if Caz’s father would like to ride a bus.
“The Village is set up to make a dementia patient feel independent as long as possible. For those who can no longer get around, there will be excellent standardized care, of course. But the Swedish research has shown us that Alzheimer’s patients who stay active in their local community as long as possible stay healthier longer. While we’re funded largely by grants at this point, we are a non-profit, and your contributions tonight make the difference in when we can open our doors.”
Bonnie caught sight of Caz leaning against the metal cabinets near the bottle-filling room. His face was pale, and his eyes didn’t leave the director’s face.
She only realized she was staring when Lexie bonked her on the arm with a long set of tongs. “Psst. I need you.”
Bonnie missed the next few things that happened on stage as she helped serve the flourless chocolate cake from Josie’s Bakery. When she was done, though, the first round of Truth or Dare was soundly in session.
Tox sat on the left of the stage, looking like a huge, rigid block of muscle. Bonnie had watched him crash through fiery falling beams to rescue a litter of newborn kittens. The man had no fear. Normally. Right now, he looked terrified. On the other side of the small stage sat Chief Barger, looking much the same as always—in uniform, his handlebar mustache polished so that it almost shone, his face placid.
Lexie held up the cards collected from the audience. The stack of yellow cards were dares, the blue ones were truths. “Next one is a dare, gentlemen!” She shuffled the yellow cards and drew one with great ceremony.
“Okay. The dare is to put a full face of makeup on—eyes, lips, and cheeks.” Lexie turned to face the crowd. “Folks, who’s going to do this? Captain Tox Ellis, the tough guy who’d probably rather die than wear eyeliner, or Chief Barger, who at this very moment, is wondering how he’d go about getting lipstick out of his mustache?”
The bids came pouring in. Bonnie watched as hand after hand went up.
“A hundred on Tox! A hundred twenty-five on the Chief! Oh, that’s more like it, two hundred on Tox, thanks, Gina! Now let’s go higher.”
The bidding ended at four hundred dollars for Tox. Grace Rowe got on stage and with great ceremony (and as if she’d planned for this to happen, Bonnie thought suspiciously), she made Tox up like a Vegas dancer: blue and green sparkly eye shadow, bright pink cheeks, red lips the color of blood. Tox was a good sport about it, adjusting the eyeliner so it was more pronounced, and grabbed Grace in a kiss afterward, leaving her lips stained and her eyes twinkling.
Two more rounds ensued, with the chief being bid upon to answer what thing he did regularly that he’d rather not admit (blushing, he said he picked his nose in the bathroom sometimes), and another dare went to Tox, who had to prank-call Caprese and ask if their refrigerator was running. When he said, “Then go out and catch it!” Lexie’s microphone actually picked up the volume of Summer Darling’s yelling, and the app bay filled with roars of laughter. Bonnie could picture Summer, surrounded by her three sisters in the kitchen, huffing and puffing about the prank, and it just made her laugh harder.
Bonnie looked around the large room—she could almost feel her heart get larger, more expansive. These were her people. Her family, both of blood and of choosing. Her father, over in the corner, had a hand on her mother’s shoulder and she watched her mother smile at him. Her first-grade teacher, Mrs. Hawkins, much older but still dear to her, shot her a smile. Bonnie’s heart lifted.
Then Lexie said, “Caz Lloyd and Bonnie Maddern to the stage, please! Ladies and gentlemen, you’re in for a treat. Caz Lloyd is our quietest firefighter, and one of the newest members of our department. Let’s drag him out of his shell. And you probably all know Bonnie, born and bred in Darling Bay, and you know she’s scared of nothing. Except maybe of what’s coming up next.”
Bonnie looked at Caz, and even across the room, she could see the tightness at the corners of his eyes. Her heart dropped into her boots. This was going to be the worst thing ever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
This was going to be the worst thing ever. Caz settled onto the hard plastic chair a few feet away from Bonnie
on the small stage and gritted his teeth. Maybe if he concentrated hard enough, he could have one of those out-of-body experiences people were always talking about on late-night TV. He’d just float up and look down on what was happening on stage and when it was all over, he could rejoin himself and get himself the hell back to the ranch.
Bonnie, on the other hand, looked positively chipper. How did she do that? Did she actually like being up here, with all eyes on her? They deserved to be on her, that was true. She looked incredible, like all her features had been dipped into something iridescent. It wasn’t makeup—he could tell that she had more on than usual (though she wore way less than the gobs piled on Tox’s face right now). It was something else. An inner glow. She was heated inside—he could feel it from where he sat.
And blast it all, how he wished he could touch her skin to feel it himself. But he couldn’t. He’d wrecked any chance of that when he’d kicked her out of his house. That had been his plan, after all—to damage that chance, to kill any glimmer of hope he could possibly have of having her, being near her.
How he was going to survive being in the rig with her, next to her, for months and months to come, he didn’t know. He was going to lose his mind as well as most of his traitorous heart.
Transfer. He’d ask—no, beg—Chief Barger for a transfer.
On the floor below their seats on the stage, Lexie grinned. She was loving her role in this, obviously. If it hadn’t been them up there, Caz could have taken pleasure in it, too. It was a fun thing to do, an amusing premise, unless you were the one on display next to the woman who heated you to diabolic temperatures without even trying.
Lexie held up a yellow card. “I’m going with a dare next. Let’s see what we can get these two to do, shall we?” Slowly, way too slowly, she pulled out a card, and then she laughed. “Okay, whoever wrote this gets an official fire explorer sticker because this is awesome. The dare is: Spend the next round sitting on the other’s person lap. Who’s going to start the bidding?”