The Fireman's Homecoming

“This whole parent thing, the coming back when you’re not a kid anymore, it’s rough. The roles get all tangled. Add your dad’s...condition...and, well, it’d be easy to see how ankles get turned.” Clark shifted himself down toward her foot again. “Flex it and see how it feels.”

She did. “It hurts less now.”

He looked back up at her with something close to the charming wink she remembered from high school. “See, better already.” He’d been bad-boy hunky as a teen; a flame of too-long red hair that tumbled behind him as he tore through town helmetless on a loud motorcycle. Now, his short hair and stunning features were strong rather than wild. He was as handsome as ever, but in a completely different manner. And far too appealing for someone already struggling with more than she could handle.

He stilled for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to say something. The same hesitation she’d seen at the coffee shop when she asked him about his accident. “Not too many people our age here to talk to. Not who get what it’s like to come back. It’s kind of a tight fit to squeeze back into Gordon Falls, don’t you think?”

Melba merely nodded again, the squall pushing harder. Clark felt so easy to talk to. He was an outsider newly forced in, just like she was. It’d be so simple to let it all spill out of her on the quiet of the riverbank. How much she wanted one other soul on earth to know she hadn’t imagined what her father blurted out in his delusion. Clark had no stake in the secret. He’d been a dangerous young man; he probably had a closetful of past secrets himself. Melba ventured a long look at him, noting that his green eyes had a singed quality around the edges. He had secrets and scars. Melba’s forefinger found Dad’s wedding band still on her thumb and tried on the thought of betraying the secret to just one other person.

“It’s hard,” she managed. How many times had she said that phrase lately? “He’s...” She couldn’t think of a way to start, and wasn’t even sure she should start at all. There was an odd, tenuous space between them—too close and yet too far apart at the same time.

“Everybody loves your dad,” Clark said after a moment, his eyes returning to a professional assessment of her ankle as his warm fingers tested muscle and joint. “They were praying for him in church while he was in the hospital and Barney told me people have been by to help.”

“Sure, now. What about weeks from now when he’s still sick? Sicker.”

“The help will still be there. Honestly, you’ll probably get more help than you need, the way folks like to poke their noses in around here.” He looked up at her again as he reached for her running shoe. “It’s going to be okay.”

His eyes were intense, focused, compelling. She had a vision of him reaching a victim in a cloud of smoke, extending a hand, saying those words with the same lure of confidence he exuded now. Trouble was, Clark only saw part of the fire burning around her—the disease, the logistical challenge. He had no idea of the full-blown firestorm licking at her heels. How she wasn’t the least bit sure it was going to be okay ever again.

It wasn’t his problem. It wasn’t fair to make it his problem, either.

Melba took the shoe, stuffing the urge to tell all back down with the same effort she forced her swollen ankle back into its shoe.

Both hurt far too much.

Chapter Five

Charlotte Taylor was a sight for sore eyes. Melba hugged the stuffing out of her coworker and best friend as she got off the train in Gordon Falls. “I’m so glad to see you!”

Charlotte, who was an urban girl to the core, spun around on her black leather boots to squint at the little train station with her mouth open. “Wow, girl, you live in a postcard. I feel like I’m on a movie set.” She nudged Melba. “You grew up in this place? Really?”

It was a funny thing, living in a place like Gordon Falls. People thought of it as peaceful and perfect, not at all ready to think of it as having bumps and warts like any other community. “Mom used to say Gordon Falls was like a duck swimming upstream. Peaceful and charming on the surface, furiously paddling with big clumsy feet underneath.”

Her words must have had more of an edge than she realized, for Charlotte dropped her overnight bag and took Melba by both shoulders. “That bad already?” she said quietly. Charlotte had lost her grandfather to Alzheimer’s two years ago, and as such she’d become Melba’s go-to shoulder to cry on. Just the look in Charlotte’s eyes returned the lump to Melba’s throat.

She shook it off, picking up Charlotte’s bag and putting an arm around her friend instead. “Yes and no. I’ve got an hour before we have to be home, so let’s go introduce you to some excellent apple pie.”

“Pie. This really is a movie set. We’re riding in an actual car, aren’t we? Not a horse and buggy?”

Charlotte was the kind of friend who could make Melba laugh even in the worst of circumstances, which was exactly why she’d called her to come out for an overnight visit. Besides, she knew the daily life of Alzheimer’s, so Melba felt comfortable bringing her to the house where she still wasn’t comfortable with lots of company yet. Dad could be so unpredictable, and not everyone could handle that. “My car is right there. We’re quaint, but not that quaint.”

Charlotte tucked herself into the passenger seat. “I half worried I’d find you in a bonnet and apron or something.”

Melba rolled her eyes. “I went ninety miles down the interstate, Charlotte, not back in time.”

Turning to look at her for a long assessment, Charlotte sighed. “You look tired. How are you holding up?”

“Some parts are okay, others have been...” Melba didn’t know how or where to begin. “...startling.” She put the car in gear. “You know what it’s like.”

“Still, it hits everyone different. It hits every day different.” Charlotte reached out a fingerless-gloved hand to give Melba’s shoulder a squeeze. “I’m glad you called. You need backup to do this. It’s just too nuts to handle alone. I have Mom, but for you...well, it’s just you.”

“I have Barney. And a month’s worth of church casseroles.” Melba seized the chance to talk about something happy. “How—and where—is Mima?”

“Oh, you know Mima.” Charlotte exhaled. Her grandmother had taken life by the horns after her husband’s long decline, and become a world traveler. “Where’s Mima?” had become a grown-up version of the children’s search book Where’s Waldo? at Melba’s office. Half of Melba’s yearning to travel the world had been nurtured by Mima’s tales of adventure. “Indonesia at the moment, then home for the holidays, then I think it’s Greenland.”

Melba laughed. “Greenland? Why?”

Charlotte shrugged her shoulders, setting her long blond hair swinging. “Why not?”

“Your grandmother never did need a reason.”

Charlotte whipped out her ever-present smartphone, fingers flying. “I’m sending her a message right now, asking her to flood you with postcards. What’s your address here in Charmingland?”

“Mima texts?”

“Mima is a thoroughly modern woman. I bought her a smartphone for her birthday.”

Melba gave the address as she pulled into Cafe Homestead, informing her friend that it was the purveyor of the state’s most delicious apple pie as well as an impressive selection of tea. Life felt a bit more in place now—good tea and a good friend made a world of difference.

* * *

An hour later, pie consumed, introductions made, and Dad happily dozing in front of the television set, Melba and Charlotte sat across from each other on the bed in Melba’s room. Melba leaned back against the headboard and fingered the eyelet lace on a yellow throw pillow left over from her teenage years. “I feel like I’m fifteen and having a sleepover,” she said, staring around at her once-beloved butter-colored walls and cream curtains.

Charlotte ran her hands through the fringe on one of the fabrics Melba had draped over those cream curtains. “It’s like you just spread the Melba I know overtop a lemon meringue pie or something.” She laughed when Melba moaned. “No, it’s sort of fun. I bet you thought this was fab-u-lous when you were that age.”

“It’s a bit weird to me now. It’s home, but then again it’s foreign territory. Like the layers won’t fit together right anymore.” She caught a photograph of her and her mother—a sunny, smiling scene from a visit home just after she’d moved to Chicago—and felt her throat tighten.

Charlotte rolled over to perch on her elbows. “Okay, we’ve done all the preliminary niceties, so why don’t you tell me what’s up?”

Melba swallowed hard. “I thought this would be easier, you know? Like a list of tasks or coordinating medications or just being around.” It was the tip of the iceberg—the big, dangerous emotional iceberg waiting to sink her Titanic—but she couldn’t think of another place to start.

Charlotte’s smile held the edge of remembered pain—her grandparents had lived with her right up until the end. “It’s hard stuff. Taking care of Grandpa was like going to war some days. With an enemy you can’t see or predict or even fight. You can only duck out of the way and hope you survive.”

The metaphor seemed to offer a way to say the unthinkable out loud. “I didn’t duck, and I’ve already been hit.” The tears came out of nowhere, like they seemed to too often these days. “A big bomb dropped on me, Charlotte, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

Charlotte scrambled across the bedspread to pull Melba into a fierce hug. “Yeah, you did know what to do. You called me. We saved the Colorado Alpaca Fleece account, girl, and that means we can tackle just about anything.”

Somehow pacifying an irate alpaca fleece supplier whose product had been mislabeled—twice—didn’t seem a match for what Dad had dumped on her, but Melba let the feisty energy of Charlotte’s hug soothe her soul. She cried on her friend’s go-to shoulder for a minute or so, then pushed her hair out of her eyes. “That was a monster of a problem, wasn’t it? This problem is a bit harder to solve, though. This bomb has...real damage potential.”

Charlotte sat up. “Okay, start at the beginning.”

Pulling her knees up to hug them, Melba let the words crawl out, small and vulnerable. “Well, you know Dad got pretty sick last week, and his mind sort of...short-circuited.”

“Good way to put it,” Charlotte sighed. “I always thought ‘dementia’ sounded so gruesome.”

“He said some things. One thing, actually, that was a big shocker.” Melba steeled herself with a deep breath, sure it would make the thing more awful to hear it spoken out loud. “He said...he said I wasn’t his.” There. She’d said it and not melted into the carpeting.

It took Charlotte a few excruciating moments to grasp what Melba was saying. “You mean, not his daughter? Biologically?”