Falling for the Fireman

“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.”

Oh, I suspect you can. “She bothers me. You should see the colors she’s gonna paint that place. It’ll be like working across the street from a life-size game of Candy Land.”

“It will, won’t it?” George chuckled. “It’ll be nice to see that building full of life again, don’t you think? My dad used to take me over to that store for root-beer floats when I was Nick’s age. Best treat in the world. Not like all the sugar water they call soda pop now.” George’s beefy hand came down onto Chad’s shoulder. “Don’t be the guy to stop Jeannie Nelworth from reopening her candy store for the holidays. It’d be giving the Grinch a run for his money.”

“She’s got to be careful.”

“She’ll be careful, Chad. She’s got more reason to be careful than all of us put together with what she’s been through. I’m kind of proud of her, actually, getting back into the swing of things so quick and taking on such a big project like this. She’s got spirit, that woman. Can’t knock Jeannie Nelworth down for long.”

That was it. The fact that Jeannie Nelworth was so unsinkably cheerful, that she bobbed right back up after every blow like some over-buoyant bath toy was exactly what bothered him about her.

Chapter Three

The restaurant down the street had blocked its secondary exit with a Dumpster again. Why didn’t some of these businesses take his inspections more seriously? A knock on his door startled Chad out of his paperwork. He looked up from the report he’d been writing to see Nick Nelworth standing in his doorway. “Hey, Mr. Owens. Chief Bradens said you had something to ask me.”

Jeannie’s son had that legs-too-long amble of every teenager, but it was the way he always hung his head that caught Chad’s attention. George was right; life had beaten Nick down a lot more than the boy would let on. The kid had lost his dad to a car crash in the first grade, and then his home had burned—all before he even hit everything high school would throw at him. How could Nick hope to have anything but a dark outlook on life, even with his mother’s high-voltage optimism? From what Chad remembered, mothers and thirteen-year-old sons barely spoke the same language as it was.

He didn’t really know Nick, hadn’t known him at all before the fire, but felt an instant recognition now. Anyone could easily see the kid was quietly unhappy. And why not? Chad recalled hating every minute of middle school, and he’d had none of Nick’s traumas to overcome. Annoyed as he was at George’s scheming, Chad couldn’t tamp down an urge to help the boy. “Hi there, Nicholas. How’s it going across the street?”

Nick rolled his eyes—those same big eyes of his mother’s. “Mom’s all weird about it. She’s talking really fast and forgetting where she put things.”

The image of Jeannie Nelworth bouncing around her store hadn’t left his mind since the meeting. “Your mom’s excited about the place?”

“Yeah, something like that.” Plug wandered in, nuzzling Nick’s hand. “Whoa, Plug, that doesn’t belong to you. Don’t go getting Mr. Owens’s forms all slobbery.” Nick raised his hand out of Plug’s reach—which didn’t take much effort, because Plug never jumped up for anything—and put the handful of forms on Chad’s desk. “Mom said to give you these…and these.” He reached into his back pocket and reluctantly produced six very bright, very sparkly yellow pens. The promotional kind with “Sweet Treats” written on them in the pink swirly script that was Jeannie’s logo. Nicholas looked about as eager to be handing those out as Chad would be to use them. “They have the new address on them and the website.” He said in the monotone of a boy repeating an instructed script. Chad wondered if there was anything more repugnant to a thirteen-year-old boy than to be the distributor of sparkly pens.

Chad scooped the pens up, noting with horror that yellow glitter came off onto his fingers. “They’re very…yellow.” He raised an eyebrow at Nick, hoping to let the boy know he wasn’t expecting an endorsement of anything so cute.

“Yep.” Plug began inspecting Nick’s hand and back pocket, evidently thinking glitter might prove tasty. “They are.”

Chad slid out of his chair and came around to the front of his desk. He squatted down to scratch Plug between the ears. “Can you keep a secret?” Nick hunched down as well, and Plug rolled over on cue, to make sure they didn’t miss scratching his big belly. “Don’t tell your mom, but I’m not a fan of glitter. On anything.”

The boy’s eyes widened, then narrowed in a laugh. “Me, neither.” Hadn’t Jeannie given a thought to what a boy’s life was like surrounded by all those perky pastels?

“Perfectly understandable. Not that I have to ask, but man-to-man, what’s your position on yellow polka dots?”

The boy looked as if he were asked to reveal state secrets. “You mean Mom’s car?” he nearly whispered. After a long pause where both of them looked at the offending vehicle, Nick said, “Someday I’m gonna have to learn to drive in that thing.”

Chad could feel Nick’s embarrassment even as he tried to hide it. He was a grown man who never cared what people think, and he’d surely hesitate to climb into Jeannie Nelworth’s Jeep. He was surprised to discover his hand had landed on the boy’s shoulder. “I feel your pain, kid.” He said it in a teasing tone, but he actually meant it. He wanted Nick Nelworth to know one person understood his predicament and how hard the world was as a thirteen-year-old boy. “Maybe we can talk her down a couple of shades by the time you hit fifteen.”

Nick laughed. “Man, I hope.”

The more relaxed look on Nick’s face refused to let Chad keep his distance. Kids were not his strong suit. He gave the safety talks every year at school and did the driver’s ed pre-prom speech about drinking and driving, but that was more because he had the time to do these things. With all the other crew volunteers, he viewed this as payback for staying off the engines. Not only that, but life had handed him too many reasons to make fire prevention a personal cause.

But this? Even George had to know this one-on-one teen stuff was way out of Chad’s job description. “Plug’s getting too fat, even for him.” He rubbed the hound’s round belly, eliciting a lazy canine moan of satisfaction. “He needs more exercise, don’t you think?”

“He’s pretty big, that’s for sure.”

“Plug needs to walk off a few pounds, wouldn’t you say? How many days a week are you free after school?”

“I’ve got math club Tuesdays and Thursdays, but nothing the other days.”

“George and I are too busy to give Plug any regular exercise. Do you think you could help us out by walking him? Twice a week, maybe? For pay, of course…say, seven dollars a week?” Plug was George’s dog, technically. George should be doing this. Chad should not be anywhere near this, and yet here he was and nearly glad of it, besides.

“I think. That is, if Mom says it’s okay. She’s gonna be up here every day working on the store, anyway.”

Chad tried to ignore Nick’s eyes, and what they did to the spot below his throat. He stood up before something stupid came out of his mouth. “George already asked your mom. You’re hired. When can you start?”

“Now.” Nicholas shot up beside him. “I could start right now.”

“I had a feeling you’d say that. Which is why I happen to have Plug’s leash right here on my desk.” Chad nudged the hound with his foot. “With this kind of enthusiasm, we’ll get you fit and trim in no time, Plug.”

Nick attached the leash after giving Plug a friendly scratch under the chin. When he looked at Chad again, the boy’s face was the complete opposite of the bored reluctance it had been when he first entered the office. George would never let him forget how right he’d been about the idea of hiring Nick Nelworth.

“Thanks. We’re off!” With a wave, Nick trotted out of the office door with a slightly confused Plug lumbering behind him. From the window he could see Nick stood up straighter, walked without most of that lanky teen shuffle and generally looked delighted. Plug even went so far as to wag his tail—something Chad hadn’t seen in months.

He thought they’d take off up the street, but evidently their first stop was across the street to Sweet Treats. If Chad’s guess was right, Sweet Treats would start carrying dog biscuits when it opened, and Plug would be a regular customer.

The next day, Jeannie sat in the front window of Sweet Treats. She wasn’t calling it “the building that would become Sweet Treats” anymore, for the space had already become the store in her mind. She was assessing how a stack of yellow paint chip choices looked in the afternoon sun. Buttercup definitely outshone Sun-kissed, but Lemon had a vitality to it she couldn’t resist. She’d nearly settled on “Lemon”—it was a candy flavor, after all—when a lumbering movement out of the corner of her eye drew her attention. Plug was sauntering across Tyler Street by himself.

It only took a second or two to figure out Plug’s motives; his red leash—the dog’s only nod to the classic firehouse Dalmatian—was clamped firmly in his slobbery jaws and he was heading straight for Sweet Treats. A determined, albeit slow-motion quest for Nicky. Jeannie couldn’t help but laugh at the sight. Sure, Nicky had told her he and Plug really enjoyed their walk yesterday, but Plug obviously hadn’t checked the clock to know Nicky wasn’t due out of school for another hour.

Her laughter turned to a gasp when a car whizzed by too close behind Plug. He swiveled his head after the speeding car, but didn’t seem to register the possible danger of being out in traffic. Had the hound ever been in the street other than watching the engines come and go from the firehouse? She could count on one hand the number of times she’d even seen him moving. Mostly Plug sat still, as he was doing now. Only now he just stood in the middle of the street, staring into her doorway as if willing Nicky to appear there.

When a second car went by, barely slowing down as it slipped between her shop and Plug, Jeannie sucked in a breath and moved. Opening her door, she called, “Go on home, Plug,” and pointed back to the firehouse. The trio of big red engine bay doors were shut. How had he gotten out? “Get back out of the street before you get hit.”

Plug cocked his head to one side in an all-too-human gesture of bafflement. “Plug, go home!” Jeannie found herself enunciating as if to a small child or someone who didn’t understand English. This was why she’d never owned a dog—you could never reason with a pet. Unreasonable sons were just about all she could handle right now. “Home, boy!”

While he didn’t sit down, he didn’t turn to go home, either. Plug just stood there, as if waiting for her to catch on that he had no plans to cut his excursion short, escorted or not.

Jeannie looked up and down the street, hoping to catch one of the volunteer firemen out looking for him. Gordon Falls boasted a full complement of volunteer firefighters, but George and Chad were often the only two in the building. Those on call only came rushing when those horrid sirens went off because that’s how a volunteer fire department worked.

Still, shouldn’t someone have noticed Plug leaving? Seeing another car heading down the street, Jeannie realized she was the only one to come to the poor hound’s rescue. Even though she wasn’t quite sure what to do, Jeannie settled on squatting down and tapping her knee the way she’d seen Nicky call him. “Well, fine then. You come here. Come, Plug. Come on, boy. Come on over here and get your fool self out of the street.” Plug took two steps toward her. “Come on, boy!” She’d let the dog stay here for the hour until Nicky could deliver him back over if the firefighters didn’t come looking for him first. She surely had no plans to walk out there and haul him back to the firehouse herself.

No, sir, she would not haul Plug back herself. She couldn’t stomach the thought of walking to the firehouse for any reason, much less a dog. Today was not the day to tackle her fear.

Other people found the red doors charming; iconic, even. Every time Jeannie looked at those huge red doors, they just seemed like hungry red mouths opening wide to eat her alive. Nope, she wouldn’t face those today.

“That’s right, come on over here and you can wait for Nicky.” At Nicky’s name, Plug picked up the pace to something that could almost be called a trot, finishing his trek across Tyler Street. He looked up at her with that comical face of his, those too-big eyes and those floppy ears, and announced his arrival by dropping the leash on the sidewalk in front of her. Then, after a pathetic growly sound which she suspected loosely translated to “Phew!” he placed his big nose on her knee and depositing a dark spot of drool on her pant leg. “You silly old thing,” she said, unable to stay annoyed once she started petting his massive, velvety ears. “Don’t you know enough to stay out of traffic?”

She didn’t like the look Plug gave her in response. His droopy eyes seemed to say “Silly yourself if you can’t walk across the street to take me home.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” she countered. “You’re not tricking me into…” Into what? Doing the thing she’d managed to avoid for weeks now? She could sit through a presentation on fire safety but couldn’t set foot in a firehouse? Who really was the silly old thing here?

No, Lord, I’m not ready. Jeannie knew she was being ridiculous, even irrational, but the thought of going near the firehouse stirred up panic in her throat. She didn’t want to be this way. She’d tried being logical, thinking of “fire safety” as a worthy community goal, but that only made things worse.

Fire was the enemy. There had been a fire during her husband Henry’s death in a car accident, as well. Looking at the aftermath of her house fire became just like being at the crash site the morning after Henry died.

I’ve been strong lots of other places. I even bought this place looking right at the fire station—wasn’t that strong? After all, weren’t these men the reason she had the ability to start over?

“You know it’s no accident you chose this building,” Abby had declared the day Jeannie signed the mortgage papers. “Some part of you needs the firehouse nearby.”

“So why am I scared to have it so close? It makes no sense.”

“You didn’t make much sense before the fire,” Abby had replied, hugging her. “I’m expecting less now.”

For five whole minutes she tried to ignore Plug’s stare, to let him wait until Nicky got home. I don’t have to go in there, not yet. Not for a dog, of all things.

She parked herself back on the windowsill and attempted a return to the paint chips. Nothing worked; her concentration had fled the building. She was going to have to go in there sometime. If not today, it’d have to be some day. Wouldn’t it be better to get it over with when Nicky wasn’t watching? That way, she’d have an hour or so to pull herself together if things were…harder than she planned. Then when Nicky showed up she could tell him how much Plug had missed him and how brave she’d been to take him back over. This was the perfect opportunity.

If she could just make herself take it.

She reached for the phone to call Abby for moral support, but put it back down. You can do this. You are stronger than this. Jeannie grabbed the leash, telling the pulse hammering in her throat to stop pounding so hard. This was a silly fear, the kind of thing she’d chide Nicky for having. No one should ever be afraid of a firehouse. Or fire engines. They meant help was on the way, didn’t they?

“Fears don’t make sense,” the school counselor had told Nicky. “That’s why you must simply face them. You can’t argue them down because they won’t listen to reason.”

“All right, then, Plug my boy, it’s time to get over this.” Strong words, but her voice wobbled as she stood up and fastened the leash to his collar with shaking hands.

“Just walk you back on over there as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. Right. Piece of cake.”

Before she could gather another bolstering breath, Plug loped off the curb and began walking. As if this had been his plan all along.

“Yep, we’re just walking across the street, taking you back home.” Talking to Plug somehow kept her breathing. “Home to the nice, clean, safe firehouse with all the big…huge…loud…red engines.”

Sounds from the fire—her fire—returned unbidden and unwelcome. Her head filled with the rumble of the engines. The noise had been so loud she felt it in her chest that horrible afternoon. The lifelike twitching and hissing of the hoses as the men fought to direct those gallons of water into the smoke pouring out of her home. The sour, sharp smell of her possessions burning, the cascading cracks of timber as her life collapsed in on itself. The running and shouting and the crunch of thick-gloved hands that kept moving her out of the way. The coaxing voices forcing her back when she wanted to plunge into the smoke after all the precious, precious things disappearing in front of her eyes. Worst of all was the crushing feeling of Henry’s memory burning with the house they had shared. She’d lost so many precious things, but the cruelest result of all was how she could fit all the surviving mementoes of Henry into a single shoebox. Without souvenirs and photographs, how would Nicky ever remember his father clearly? Videos capturing his voice and gestures were gone. His teaching notes from his physics professorship at the local state university were now ash in the wind. How could a young boy remember the best part of a man, his strong soul or the way he loved life? She could barely picture Henry’s handwriting now, and it tore her to pieces.