The Fireman's Homecoming

The color clash was a mirror of her mood. Events felt confusing since last night, facts wouldn’t fit together in neat patterns, and life itself felt disjointed and tangled.

“I’m...” she searched for the right verb as she stroked Pinocchio, the fat tabby who’d been their pet since Melba was sixteen “...tumbling into a new life today, hm?” Tumbling seemed like the best word. Tumbling was something set in motion not by her, but by things beyond her ability to control. Tumbling didn’t imply control or direction—and she felt like none of those were in her grasp today. Pinocchio merely purred and pushed against her hand, the universal cat gesture for “more, please.”

“Dad’s coming home today. You’ll get plenty of petting soon.” Pinocchio was one of the few things guaranteed to calm Dad down when he got confused. Pinocchio and music. Melba had loaded Dad’s favorite record album—a collection of old hymns played on the piano—onto her digital music player so she could play them for him in the hospital. She had it playing now. It was nice to have the music cue the long-remembered lyrics in her head—“Great is Thy Faithfulness” was a good message for someone thrashing their way through a huge life shift.

When she heard the cuckoo clock downstairs in the living room announce 8:00 a.m., Melba shook off the afghan and hoisted Pinocchio from her lap. Resolutely, she walked downstairs. Face the day head-on, Melba girl. Bright April sunshine filled the kitchen from the window over the sink. Melba let the light soak in, a welcome counterbalance to the cloudy way her soul felt today. Cued by the music, Melba sang the hymn’s reassuring words as she loaded her breakfast dishes into the twenty-year-old dishwasher and spun the funky little dial to hear it gurgle to life.

Am I gurgling to life? Or about to drown?

Barney was sitting at the kitchen table making a shopping list when Melba came back downstairs dressed and showered. With a lopsided grin, she nodded toward the dishwasher. “You paid for that, didn’t you?”

Melba had to laugh. “I’m used to living in an apartment building where you can run the dishwasher and the shower at the same time.” She mimed a shiver. “Brrr, but at least I’m wide awake now. I don’t suppose they have decent chai tea at the supermarket here, do they? I need better caffeine these days.”

Barney laughed. She was a hefty, jolly woman, the kind whose eyes sparkled and whole body jiggled when she laughed. “Lipton’s about as exotic as they get down at Morgan’s Finer Foods, darlin’.”

Melba added Stop at Karl’s Koffee and get some decent tea to her mental list of “Dad Coming Home Tasks.”

“Coming-home day,” Barney said as she opened the door and surveyed the empty fridge. “Glad of it, too. I don’t like to think of your dad holed up in one of those cold, harsh hospital rooms. He needs his things around him, you know?”

“He does, I know.” Half of her was glad Dad was going to be discharged today, but the other half of her was anxious, even with Barney’s offer of extra help. “Dr. Nichols just called the fever ‘a bump in the road,’ but I’m worried. He seemed to...” she searched again for the right verb “...unravel in a way he hasn’t before.” It seemed a better way to put it than “I think he blurted out a deep dark secret about me,” which was what the back of her mind had been yelling at her all morning despite every effort to ignore it.

“Hey,” she called over her shoulder as she stuffed papers into a purple batik tote bag, “did Dad ever blurt stuff out at you...say things you’re not sure he meant?” It didn’t come off as casually as she tried to make it sound.

She felt Barney’s hand on her shoulder and almost resisted turning, afraid she’d be unable to stop herself from crumpling into a tearful heap on the big woman’s shoulders. “It’s not him talking, child, it’s the disease. Don’t you dare take it personal when he gets mean like that.”

Melba swallowed, unsure whether to be glad Barney half mistook her real question. “I know.”

Barney pointed at her. “Do you know how glad—how well and truly glad—he was to know you were coming home to him? How much that meant to him? Means to him?”

“It means as much to me. He acts like it was this big sacrifice on my part, as if he has to make it up to me every waking moment, but I chose to come back. I would never have chosen not to come.” She blinked back the tears that threatened. Over the last two days it felt like she’d spent more time swallowing back a sob than she spent breathing. She tugged what proved to be the last tissue from the box on the kitchen table.

Barney smirked and grabbed the grocery list from the table to add “tissues x 3” to her list. “There’s too many youngsters would have chosen not to come, you know. Kids who bolt when life gets hard or messy. Life is hard and messy, I tell my Jake all the time.” She cupped Melba’s cheek like a doting grandmother. “The wise among us know you live into the hard, live into the mess, because running from it never works. It always comes and finds you.” Barney waved her hands as if shooing her words like flies. “As if you need any such sermon on a day like today. How about I make sure there’s a chocolate cake waiting for you and Mort when you get home? Jake’ll tell you there’s no healing power like that of a wise mama’s chocolate cake.”

Melba started to decline, and then decided a wise mama bearing chocolate cake was no gift horse to look in the mouth. Not today. “Just get some skim milk to go with it?”

Barney scowled a bit, obviously thinking anything “reduced fat” was an abomination of nature. The woman put whipping cream in her coffee, and was probably the reason Dad managed to keep most of his weight on when so many other of Dr. Nichols’s patients dropped pounds. “And yogurt, if you don’t mind,” Melba added, remembering the full bag of fries she’d put away with glee last night. “Anything with ‘light’ on the label will do.” She needed to get running again or her waistline would soon succumb to the ravages of the Barney Meal Plan.

“Call my cell when you know what time you’ll be coming home. I’ll make sure Jake swings by in case we need some of my son’s manpower to get your dad up the steps.”

Dad unable to get himself up his own front steps. The thought struck a cold note under her ribs. She grabbed the keys to her Prius and applied a smile to her face. “It’ll be okay, Barney, I’m sure it will.”

“Well, you know what they say.”

Melba stopped with the door half-open. “What do they say?”

“It’ll all be okay in the end. And if it ain’t okay yet, well, then it ain’t the end yet either.”

Oh, no, Melba thought, it’s just the beginning.

* * *

Clark caught sight of Melba as she walked down Tyler Avenue, Gordon Falls’s main street, toward the corner that housed Karl’s Koffee. He was glad she looked a bit stronger. He rushed across the street to tap her shoulder. “Hey, Melba, hi. Look, I’m really sorry about last night.”

“You shouldn’t apologize—you didn’t do anything other than bring me dinner. I’m sorry Dad hauled off at you like that. I think maybe he thought you were someone else.”

“I knew it wasn’t about me. But being an hour late with your food? That was all me.”

“Yeah, but you already apologized for that.”

There was still so much weariness in her eyes. “That’s some tough going with your dad. Is he coming home anytime soon?”

“I’m heading over there in a bit. Yesterday afternoon Dr. Nichols said he would probably come home today, but...” She shrugged while he pulled open the door to Karl’s for her. “It’s so up-and-down, you know?”

No, he didn’t know. Pop was still as sharp as a tack and going strong at fifty-four, and while Mom’s diabetes had taken her life too soon, it had never been the sort of drawn-out trauma Melba had ahead of her. “That memory-loss stuff seems so hard to handle.”

“Most times it’s not so bad but you...well...” She blinked, and took a deep breath. “You caught him at his worst.”

Clark felt an unwanted tug toward Melba and the huge burden she carried. He was always a softie for a damsel in distress, only now was absolutely not the time. Now was supposed to be all about his new job at the department, about making things right with Pop. Still, every lecture he’d given himself about professional focus couldn’t stop the invitation from coming out of his mouth. “Buy you a cup of coffee?”

She looked up at him as if the thought of someone doing something nice for her were a foreign custom. “You don’t owe me.”

“I know.” Now it was he who shrugged. “But if you were heading for Karl’s I’m guessing you could use one.”

She gave him a slip of a smile, just enough of a hint to let him know her full-blown grin would have distracted him for hours. Cut that out, Bradens. You promised no female distractions. You get sidetracked and stupid when a woman enters the picture, and too much is on the line here. She ordered a scone and some odd chai thing—soy milk and other strange ingredients—and surprised him by asking for a china mug instead of a to-go cup which made him feel obligated to do the same. It felt like cheating on his “no female distractions” policy when he slipped into the booth by the window—she obviously thought he’d meant a visit when he offered to buy her a drink, not just the purchase of a beverage. And it’d be rude to refuse, right? Sitting down for coffee. A friendly cup of coffee. Between friends. When was the last time he’d done that? He didn’t even know Karl’s would serve in actual mugs, and he lived here.

And now, so did she. Distractions...

“Extra time.” She sighed, looking around the folksy little coffeehouse. “I’d forgotten it existed. I’d also forgotten it only takes two seconds to get anywhere in Gordon Falls. I’m so used to leaving time for traffic.”

“We don’t really get Chicago-brand traffic in Gordon Falls. You can count the streetlights on one hand. Ah, but come some of the holiday weekends, just watch how the locals grumble that you can’t park within a block of Tyler Avenue.”

She gave a small laugh as she wrapped her hands around the large blue stoneware mug. She wore a dark purple nail polish and all those rings he’d noticed the other night. He couldn’t tell if the exotic spicy scent that wafted toward him was from her hair or the tea, but its uniqueness intrigued him. And that hair, that mass of dark curls tumbling around her shoulders—how had he not remembered Melba Wingate and that hair? “You were a freshman when I was a junior, weren’t you?” Clark had absolutely no remembrance of the teenage Melba. Sure, he knew her name—Wingate’s Log Cabin Resort had been a Gordon Falls staple for years before they’d finally closed up shop after Mrs. Wingate died—but nothing else about her. “What did you do after school?”

Melba sipped her tea. “I went to design school in Chicago, and then got a job at a textile import house. I figured import-export was the perfect way to see the world. I got to do a few trips and was getting ready to go on a large-scale overseas buying expedition when things got...” Her eyes flashed up at him, then back into the mug. “...complicated. Work’s been really nice about the whole thing, shifting me to handle their online catalogue while I’m here dealing with...Dad.” She used a knife to cut her scone in half. A perfect, thoughtful cut. Artistic. “You?”

Clark thumbed the name badge on his shirt pocket. “Two years of criminal justice at the local community college, but I was never the kind of guy to finish things, so I went into firefighting pretty much after that. I worked in Detroit for seven years until I came back here.”

“The big-city fireman.”

“Well, Detroit. Maybe not as big as Chicago, but it makes up for it in intensity.”

She sized him up as she ate a bite of her scone. “I never pegged you for the kind to come back home.”

It had to come up sooner or later. Clark sighed. He still hadn’t come up with a graceful way to answer comments like that. “It’s not a new story. Bad boy goes off to the big city to find new ways to be bad, hits bottom, comes home a changed man.” Clark pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking that sounded arrogant. “Or hopes he comes home a changed man. I’m still ironing out the kinks, as you already know.”

She leaned back in the booth, finger running around the rim of her mug. “I think I remember hearing something about an accident. Was that the bottom you hit?”

Calling that night an accident was like calling an earthquake a bump in the road. Talking about that point in his life was a four-hour conversation, not something for a quick morning coffee. It wasn’t the kind of thing Clark could share with just anyone, despite the warm look in Melba’s eyes. She was dealing with her life tilting in a different direction, and he knew what that felt like. Maybe that was why he felt so drawn to her. But she had enough trouble on her plate. Digging into his own mess with Melba Wingate was not on today’s menu—on this year’s menu—of good ideas. He drank down the last of his coffee and made a show of checking his watch—the only way he could think of to slip out of the oncoming conversation. “Yeah, well, that’s a story needing way more time than you or I have.”