Falling for the Fireman

“Obviously.” Chad wore a dark green turtleneck that wouldn’t have looked half as severe on any other man. He never dressed starkly—mostly like a man who never put much thought into how he looked—but somehow everything about him managed to have sharp edges. Even his green eyes, which currently held an unsettling hint of amusement, flashed more murky than mossy under his short, dark hair. “Do you always talk to empty rooms?”

“Henry used to say I could think only with my mouth moving.” She’d always thought it funny but now it just sounded foolish.

“Your late husband?”

It startled her that he had to ask; everyone in town knew Henry. Had Chad really not been in Gordon Falls long enough to have known him? “Yes. We lost him in a car accident when Nicky was six.” It felt odd to realize someone she knew hadn’t known Henry. As if it signaled just how long Henry had been gone.

His stance softened a bit at her answer, as if tripped up by the tragedy. Chad was as athletic as any of the firemen he worked with, but he moved like a man who would have preferred to take up less space in the world. If he ever got excited about anything, she’d never seen it.

Well, she wouldn’t allow him to do his wet-blanket routine in this place this morning. She pointed to the amazing woodwork near the top of the walls. “Isn’t this moulding incredible? It’s artwork. Why would anyone think covering up such craftsmanship with one of those boring industrial drop ceilings was a good idea? Outlaw that in one of your building codes.”

“Some people think new is better, no matter what.” Chad looked up at the partial latticework of steel strips that had held up one of those horrid 1970s foam-tile ceilings and scratched his chin. His strong features could have been dashing if his personality would just lighten up, but he always seemed rather sad. He followed her gaze up to the wondrously curvy wood moulding. “Scraping the old paint off all those curlicues won’t be an easy job.”

Jeannie palmed the fat arc of a wooden support column, ignoring his pessimism. The store had six thick columns running down each side of the long narrow shop. They were stately things no one ever put in buildings anymore. When she was finished, each column would bear rounds of wrought-iron display baskets, brimming with salt water taffy and her famous chocolate-covered caramels; a forest of sweetness down either side of the aisle. “Oh, I won’t scrape those,” she said, pointing upward. “I love the texture of all those layers. All those years, all that history. They’ll be stunning when I paint them up in bright colors.”

Chad simply stared at the ceiling with his hands in his pockets. She wondered, by the tilt of his chin, if he was trying to see what she saw. Perhaps he was just categorizing her as a loony optimist, a thorn in his side as the fire marshal and building inspector who had to sign off on all her ambitious remodeling plans. He surveyed the entire ceiling before bringing his gaze down to her with narrowed eyes. “Are you going to paint all the exposed ductwork up in bright colors, too? The sprinkler pipes and such?”

Jeannie leaned against the beam, wincing as it groaned a bit. The late-September wind whistled through something behind her, announcing the gap-toothed age of the windows and doors. She spoke over the sound. “Of course. I’m going to paint everything bright colors.”

He sighed, a sound considerably more weary than the building’s aged whistle. “I was afraid of that.”

“You don’t see it? The energy, the kids on summer vacation, the tourists buying goodies for their family back home? The noisy students after school and on Saturday mornings?” It was so clear to her, she couldn’t imagine anyone not picturing the vivid image.

“I see outdated plumbing and old wires and no sprinkler system. I see a whole lot of work, frankly.”

“You’ve no imagination.” She sighed. “That’s sad.”

“I’m paid to see exactly what’s there. That’s safety.”

The insurance adjuster was going to be here any minute, and Jeannie wasn’t going to let Chad Owens rain on her parade. Not today. Jeannie set about unrolling the blueprints, weighting down its curling corners with the thermos of coffee and box of cookies she’d brought for the meeting. “You don’t have to set foot in here once you’ve signed off on my permit,” she called over her shoulder as she heard Chad’s boots traveling the floor with calculated, assessing steps. “You don’t ever have to cross over from your dark and gloomy side of the street if you don’t want to.”

Chad stopped and looked at her. “Dark and gloomy?”

“I wasn’t talking about the decor.” In fact, the fire station across the street was another local landmark, a majestic stone castle with bright red trim on the windows and a trio of enormous red doors. The Gordon Falls Volunteer Fire Department stood as a hub of activity and civic pride. Lots of people loved the firehouse, as she had before her association with the place became a little too personal. She used to be the kind of person who loved candles, too, but now she couldn’t even strike a match. There was a reason she was bricking up the fireplace in here.

“I’m sorry,” she conceded, shooting up a quick prayer to God for a bigger helping of grace this morning. “It’s just that, while I’m all for safety, you know you can be a bit of a glass-half-empty kind of guy sometimes.” All the time, she silently added.

“You think I’m the kind of person who’d pull over Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve if I saw a taillight out.”

“If I believed in Santa. And that sleighs had taillights.”

He squared his stance at her. “It’s my job to be careful. I take it very seriously, and you should be glad that I do. Here’s the last of the forms you need to file for the occupancy permit. You can have Nick bring them over when he comes this afternoon to…start his job.” He said that final part with an air of endurance.

Even though the answer was clear on his face, Jeannie asked, “What do you think of George’s scheme?”

“I think George means well.” He swallowed the rest of this thought, she could tell.

“But…”

“But only time will tell if it’s a good idea. If it helps.”

Nicky just needed something to do, something to take care of—no one thought of this as some kind of home-remedy therapy. Of course it would help. “He’ll love it. Plug needs it as much as Nicky. More, actually.”

“He’s a fat dog, I’ll grant you that. As for the rest of it…” She didn’t like the look in his eyes as he let the sentence hang in the air unfinished. He handed her the papers she needed for the adjuster and turned to go. You’d better let me in on what You’re doing here, Lord, she prayed as Chad closed the door, because I can’t see how Nicky and Chad will ever get along.

George looked up from the hose he was inspecting, making Chad realize he’d let the firehouse door slam harder than necessary. “So,” George said with a smirk, “how are things at the Big Rock Candy Mountain?” As last night’s dog-walking proposition had proven, George kept his hands in every aspect of Gordon Falls’s community life. He kept his nose in the lives of each and every one of his volunteer firefighters, too. The younger firefighters loved George. His grandfatherly personality was half the reason Gordon Falls hosted a volunteer fire corps. People would do anything to help the guy.

“I think you’re nuts with this dog thing.”

“But you’ll go along with it, right?”

Chad would do anything to help George—except climb a ladder again, although he’d been known to pitch in during extraordinary circumstances. George never questioned Chad’s decision to “chain himself to a desk,” even though he disagreed with the choice. They had too many mutual secrets not to defend each other. Chad was one of the few people who knew the now-widowed George even had a son. Clark had been a colleague of Chad’s back during his early firefighting days, but the Bradens men hadn’t spoken to each other in almost ten years. Stubborn as oxen, the pair of them. Despite the fact that Clark had somehow managed to refer Chad to this position here in Gordon Falls, Chad never could get either man to divulge the source of the wedge between them. He and George understood each other’s private wounds, respected them and had developed a father-son relationship of their own.

“That place is going to be a riot of color. And loud.” Chad set down the clipboard he’d taken over to Jeannie’s, pausing to scratch Plug. “Jeannie Nelworth is optimistic to a fault.”

“What a surprise,” George grunted as he wrestled the massive section of hose onto its shelf. “Still, everything’s in order?”

“Yes.” Chad finished with Plug and stepped over the dog to help George work another section into stiff coils. George was well past the age other fire chiefs retired. He ought to be sitting at the diner arguing with Gordon Falls’s other grandpas, fishing on the river and populating church spaghetti dinners, not coiling hoses. Still, stubborn old George refused to even consider the notion of stepping down.

“That’s not a very convincing yes.”

“She needs to be more cautious. That’s an old building and she’s gonna have mobs of kids in there every afternoon.”

George pushed his ever-present baseball hat back on his head, showing his balding mop of now-more-white-than-red hair. “This is a woman who’s just survived a fire, Chad. You of all people know what that does to a person. Go easy. I have no doubt she’ll go the extra mile so all those cute little tykes can stay safe buying their bubblegum. She’s just raw right now, and she needs to move forward to feel better. Take a little extra care walking her through the process, will you?”

Chad scowled. Extra care was George’s department, not his. It was George who stuffed himself into the firehouse’s Santa suit for every Christmas party, George who’d found Plug as a stray puppy and took him in despite serving no clear use short of good company. Which begged the question he’d been wanting to ask George since yesterday: “So why draft me into overseeing Nick as Plug’s official dog walker?”

“Your sunny disposition, of course.”

With a whistle Plug would ignore, George walked out of the equipment bay into the firehouse kitchen to pull open the refrigerator. “You can relate to the boy, I think. He needs watching. And you? You’ve been gloomier than usual. I know October’s coming, but…”

“Don’t.” Chad hated it when George got it into his head to play armchair shrink.

The old chief sighed. “It’s been eight years, Chad. That’s too long to play hermit, don’t you think?” George pulled out a brown glass bottle of root beer and snapped its cap against the bottle opener mounted nearby.

Chad moved in front of him. “So I need a thirteen-year-old? To supervise? This is a bit off the mark, even for you.”

“You’re just like Nick. You need something other than your losses to care about. And goldfish are lame.”

“George…”

Ignoring his challenge, George took a healthy swig followed by a satisfied sigh, then gazed out the kitchen window onto Tyler Street. “He’s a great kid, but he’s been through too much. The way I see it, you know something about holding up that kind of weight. And since you won’t go full-time back onto an engine, you’ve got too much free time.”

George could be exasperating when he hatched a plan, but Chad knew better than to argue with him. He didn’t care one bit for the orchestrating look in George’s eye as they stood in silence for a moment, staring across Tyler Street to Jeannie’s shop. A pair of work lights strung from the high ceilings of Jeannie’s shop gleamed out through the front windows on either side of the boarded-up doorway like yellow eyes over a square wood nose. Her yellow polka-dotted Jeep was still out front, but the blue insurance van had driven off. Jeannie was probably still in there, cooing to the woodwork with visions of sugarplums dancing in her head.

“I don’t want to do this, George.”

“Well, I suppose I can’t make you, either.”