The Fireman's Homecoming

“Clark Bradens? Why’d he come up?”

“Some folks want to throw him a nice party when George retires and he takes up as fire chief. I say it’s a fine thing to celebrate a son coming home like that. Others, well...they don’t see it that way. All they can see is a young high school punk coasting on his papa’s coattails. Honestly.” Melba wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “How many years has it been, and since when isn’t a man allowed to grow up and get it right?”

“Who says he’s grown up and gotten it right?” Melba could hardly believe Dad was standing behind her. He’d gotten up out of the recliner all on his own?

“He seemed nice enough to me.”

“When’d you meet him?”

Dad was fine, Dad wasn’t so fine. It was like living on an emotional Ping-Pong table. “I just told you I ran into him this morning.” Her frustration ran away with her better sense, because she heard herself add, “You yelled at him last night when he brought me food in your hospital room.”

“I couldn’t have yelled at him. He’d have no business visiting me.”

“I just said he was bringing me food. I met him in the hospital cafeteria and he offered to get Dellio’s for me but a fire alarm made him late.”

Dad shuffled into the kitchen and plopped himself down on the nearest chair. “He’s going to be fire chief.” He did not say it like a person pleased with the idea. In fact, his words had a “there goes the neighborhood” tone.

Melba started to say “We just talked about that,” but shut her mouth in resignation. Instead, she caught Barney’s eye over her father’s head, and they shared a split second of silent concern.

“Did you really holler at that boy? Or rather, since he is older than your daughter, did you really holler at that man?” Barney asked.

“I just said I didn’t yell at that Bradens boy,” Dad snapped.

“Have the world your way, then.” Barney huffed. It was what she said whenever Dad’s version of the world didn’t line up with reality. Melba hoped she’d someday acquire the ability to let it roll off her the way Barney did. “Get on out of this kitchen, you grumpy old man. Dinner won’t be ready for another fifty minutes.”

Melba reached out to help her father out of his chair, but he brushed her off. With considerable effort, Dad pushed himself up and shuffled, grumbling, back to the recliner. She stared after him and shook her head. “Should I be glad he’s moving around, or annoyed at his mood?”

Barney laughed and pulled a package of brown-and-serve rolls out of the freezer. “Both.”

Melba got a cookie sheet out of the cabinet and took the package from Barney. “He really did haul off at Clark in the hospital room,” she said quietly as she broke apart the rolls and arranged them on the cookie sheet. “It was scary, actually. Came out of nowhere. He yelled at Clark like they knew each other.”

Barney leaned back against the counter. “You know George Bradens and your father have never gotten along—not for a long time, anyway. Too easy to get a flood of bad water under the bridge in a small town like this. I heard they were close when they were younger.”

A thought struck Melba. “Clark looks a lot like his dad, doesn’t he?”

“With all that Bradens red hair, I expect he does. I ain’t ever seen a photo of young George but I can picture it easy enough.”

Melba moved closer. “Dad kept thinking I was Mom last night. Do you suppose he thought Clark was George, thought it was back then?”

“Could be.”

“The question is, then, what could have happened in the past that made Dad so angry at George?”

“Who knows?” Barney nodded in the direction of the living room. “But take care, hon. Sometimes it don’t pay to dig up past hurts like that.”

Too late, Melba thought. The digging’s been started for me. Only I don’t know if Dad realizes he’s the one who picked up the shovel.

* * *

Melba pulled on her robe and padded downstairs like a woman about to face the noose. She’d been up half the night, her mind a storm of questions about what her father had said at the hospital when they’d been alone. She’d tried to put it out of her mind, knowing Dad didn’t want to talk about it. Help me let it go, she’d prayed nearly hourly since Dad had come home, but to no avail. With the thin pale rays of dawn came the realization that it could no longer be avoided.

She knew as she smelled coffee that there would never be a better time. He was up, sitting with coffee in his recliner. She was still up, having barely slept. And Barney wasn’t due for another hour. Give me the right words, Father. This is going to need so much grace and I’m running on empty.

“Morning, Dad.”

He turned toward her, and she marveled at the health in his features. He looked like Dad again, not that ghost of Dad who’d thrashed around his hospital bed. “Mornin’ Melbadoll.” He smiled, and she fought the urge to just let the day slide into peaceful normalcy.

It won’t. It can’t until you talk about this, she argued with herself while she fixed a cup of tea and dragged herself into the living room to perch on the ottoman by Dad’s chair. “I need to ask you something, Dad.”

He raised an eyebrow and sipped his coffee. “Shoot.”

She’d rehearsed twelve ways to ask this, but couldn’t think of one. “I know people say stuff when they’re sick, and you had a high fever, but you said something to me in the hospital.”

“Okay, maybe I could be nicer about that Bradens boy, but...”

“No, Dad, it doesn’t have anything to do with that.” She couldn’t resist adding, “But yes, you could be nicer.” She stirred her tea, trying to come up with the right words. “This is...something you said to me. Actually—” this hurt to say “—I think you thought you were talking to Mom, the way you said it.” When his eyes grew anxious, she added, “You were pretty sick and on a lot of medication.”

“You look so much like her.” He said it with such tenderness, then shifted his gaze away from her to out the window.

“I like that, you know? It used to bug me in school when everyone would say, ‘Oh, you must be Maria’s daughter,’ but I like it now.” Melba squinted her eyes shut, pulling up a thread of courage from the place deep inside her chest that hadn’t settled since the hospital. “Dad, you looked at me, called me Maria, and said ‘She ought to know she’s not mine.’”

Melba watched her father’s body take in the words. Even with his face away from her, it was like a shock wave, hitting his shoulders, flinching his fingers, pushing on his chest. Part of her wanted him to not remember, to dismiss it as another of his “gone away” moments, but the telltale movements left no doubt. She was almost afraid for him to turn toward her.

When he did, his face was so full of pain and heartbreak it pummeled the breath from her lungs. “I didn’t say that.” It was a last-ditch denial.

“Yes, Dad, you did. And I think we should talk about it, don’t you?”

He turned away from her again. The fingers around his coffee cup began to twitch. “I didn’t say...” The coffee cup tumbled out of his grasp before she could catch it, spilling coffee on his lap. He yelped at the heat, the flash of anger she’d grown to fear surging up in him. “Don’t give me hot coffee like that!” he snapped at her, forgetting it was he who’d served himself this morning. To think she’d been pleased at his self-sufficiency.

By the time Melba had gotten Dad cleaned up and calmed down, they were both exhausted and irritable. When she arrived, Barney’s frown told Melba they looked as bad as they felt. Melba looked up from her third cup of tea as she clung to her last nerve while Dad shouted things at the news broadcasters from a too-loud television in the living room.

“Last night not go so well?” Barney said, nodding toward the blasting news headlines on the other side of the kitchen door.

“No, the night went fine. This morning, not so much.”

“Did he fall?”

“No. It’s my fault. I tried to get him to explain something he said to me in the hospital and it...” Melba pushed out a breath that felt like concrete in her lungs. “It didn’t go well.” She hated that she felt tears twist up her throat. “He’s so...here sometimes, and then the next second he’s...” She swallowed, unable to come up with a suitable alternative to “gone.”

Barney sat down. “I know,” she said, putting a hand over Melba’s. “This is hard. For you most of all. You gotta have faith God’s going to walk you through this, and I know you do, but that don’t mean it isn’t tough to see some mornings.” She frowned at Melba’s face, asking, “How much sleep did you get last night?”

I must look a sight, Melba thought. She was still in her pajamas and hadn’t put her contacts in or brushed her hair. “Not a whole lot.”

Barney patted Melba’s hand. “Why don’t you go upstairs and nap a bit. I’ll take care of Mr. Personality in there and see if I can’t lighten the mood.”

“Actually—” Melba stifled a yawn “—I think the best thing for me would be a run. A little sunshine and fresh air ought to do me a world of good.”

“Never could see the point in that, but if that’s your ticket, then by all means. Go burn off stress.”

“Burn off chocolate cake, actually.” Melba was surprised to find a smile creep onto her lips. Nothing was going to solve itself anytime soon, so she was going to have to learn to cope while knee-deep in uncertainty. Uncertainty over what to think, what to do, where to find the answers she sought. And most of all, uncertainty over how to deal with the revelation that she was now certain was true—that Dad wasn’t her father after all. She needed time to think, to pray, to start pulling at all those knots in front of her, and she did that best while running.

Chapter Four

Chad Owens kept jogging. “Forget about it. What do a bunch of old ladies know?”

Clark held out a hand to halt Chad’s steps as they jogged together on the river bank path. He wanted Chad to take more offense at what he’d just heard. “Those old ladies know how to make a fuss, how to complain to other people, and probably how to write letters to the editor of the town newspaper. I’m going to pay for the fact that they aren’t happy about the idea of me as fire chief.”

Chad shook his head and kept running. “The town council’s already voted. You’re already hired. You’re in uniform. You formally take over in a month. It’s just noise.”

“I go to that church.” Clark dashed to catch up. “I spent three hours mopping out the basement from the last flood. Why do they still think of me as some kind of hooligan?”

Now it was Chad who stopped. “You can’t tell me you didn’t see this coming.” He wiped his forehead with one sleeve. “You didn’t exactly leave here Prince Charming. Did you think everyone would come around in the first month?”

Clark didn’t really have an answer. “I suppose I figured once the hiring became official, that’d be the end of it.”

Chad put one leg up on the park bench beside him and stretched a calf muscle. “Come on, Clark, I didn’t even grow up here and I could have told you this was going to happen.” He looked straight at Clark. “You have some pretty big fire boots to fill.”

“Tell me about it.”

Chad cuffed Clark’s shoulder. “He’s been fire chief around here for ages. You’d constitute a big change even if you were identical to him.”

It wasn’t much of a help.

“And you’re completely different from him,” Chad continued as he stretched the other leg.

Clark started running again. “Thanks for the vote of confidence there.”

“Hang on.” Chad caught up. “What I’m trying to say is this is an uphill battle no matter who steps in as chief, so don’t worry about a little bit of friction.”

“Oh, so I suppose that’s why you didn’t step up to take over as chief? Didn’t want to take the hit but happy to watch me go down in flames?” Clark didn’t really feel that way, but life didn’t offer up too many chances to rib Chad Owens, so he had to find his targets when he could. It had gotten a bit easier since he’d married just before Clark came back to town.

“I’m too busy to be chief.”

“Too busy playing the happy newlywed. You’ve put on a few pounds being married to the candy store lady.”

Chad smirked. He smirked a lot more since his wife, Jeannie, and stepson, Nick, had come into his life, and Clark was truly happy for the guy. “I can handle it. And what about you?”

“Oh, that’s the last thing I need right now. I’ve got to play the straight-and-narrow for a while. One hundred percent work and no social entanglements for the first six months, that’s my plan.”

“Funny thing about plans...” Chad said.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before, but this is Gordon Falls. I’m safe. I’ve been here three weeks and so far the only single woman I’ve met is Melba Wingate.” He tried to put disinterest in his voice, but the truth was Melba’s chocolate-brown eyes and cascades of hair entered his memory far too easily.

Chad turned and jogged backwards in front of him, raising a teasing eyebrow. “Melba Wingate, huh?”

Clark reached out and nearly pushed him over. “Her dad’s sick—she’s got enough on her plate. And besides, you know I don’t go for the artsy, esoteric types.”

Chad stumbled but caught his footing. “I seem to remember athletic blondes being your specialty. In alarming numbers.”

“Before,” Clark corrected a bit too sharply, but it was a sore spot and Chad knew it.

“Before you cleaned up your act.” Chad stopped and caught Clark’s shoulder. “And you have. Look, you’ve pulled the biggest U-turn of anyone I know, Clark. I respect that. Everyone else will, too, you just have to give them time to see the change I’ve seen. Come on, even your dad came around. You’re supposed to be here. Some old stories from who you were ten years ago aren’t going to change that.”

It was as much of a speech as Clark had ever heard from Chad. He clasped Chad’s hand on his shoulder, thankful for their friendship. “Thanks.” Before things got too gooey, he ducked under Clark’s arm and started running at a faster pace. “But you’re still fat and married.”

“Yeah, well, you’re still skinny and obsessive.”

“Lean and focused,” he called as he turned a corner of the riverside path, “lean and focused.” He turned back to see Chad was not following him. “What?”

“I’m done for the morning. You take that final mile on your own.”

Clark pumped his fists in the air victoriously. “Because I can.”

“Because you need to. See you at the station at two for the meeting with P.A. Crimson.” They had a meeting with a safety equipment company that afternoon—Chad was seeing to it that Clark met all the vendors and suppliers.

Clark began thinking of all the ways he could kid Chad for “going soft” as he kept running. It wasn’t hard; Chad was an easy target these days. Once a somber, serious loner, Chad had fallen hard—and completely against his will—for Jeannie Nelworth and her young son. Now the three of them were the poster family for happy endings, all sugary happiness and love-struck smiles. It was nice, in a make-your-teeth-hurt kind of way. Chad had known a lot of pain in his life, had lost a fiancée to a fire and shut down for too many years. It was fun to rib him for his newfound light-heartedness.

The perfect taunt had just come to Clark, and he was actually laughing out loud as he turned a corner on the jogging path and nearly tripped over Melba Wingate. She was sitting on the path clutching one ankle and he almost tumbled over top of her but managed to catch himself to stumble alongside.

“Whoa....you okay?”

Melba looked up at him with the same eyes he’d seen that first night at the hospital. Strained, weary, hanging on by a thread. And now, physical pain laced her expression as well. “That depends on your definition,” she winced.

* * *

“Well, then, let’s see.” Melba watched Clark kick into first-responder mode, tugging at the sweatshirt now tied around his waist to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He crouched down beside her, lifted her ankle and gently removed her shoe, then tucked the bunched-up sweatshirt under her leg to cushion her foot as he set it back down. She tried not to wince, but ended up sucking in her breath sharply when he ran an assessing hand over her throbbing ankle.

“Ouch.” She hated how weak and wobbly her voice sounded. She hated that she was on the verge of tears. Not because her leg hurt that much—although it was painful—but because it was a last straw of sorts. She’d thought the run would clear her head of her problems, but all it did was add another one on top. One more ding in an already battered-feeling life.

“No break, but you’re swelling a bit. I’d say ‘ouch’ is justified.”

Somehow, it was the exact wrong thing to say. Melba’s fragile emotions took it as permission to overflow. She tried to hold it back, but a small sob escaped from her tight throat. This is a really bad place to lose it, she told herself, but the admonition only made things worse. She looked away, pointlessly trying to hide the tears that stole disobediently down her face.

“Hey.” Clark’s voice dropped its clinical tone completely. The warmth of it only made things worse. That kind of tone always got to her these days. The best nurses in Dad’s hospital—the ones for whom crisis caring was a true gift, not just a job—could bring on tears just with a hand on her shoulder. “Whoa there, you just turned an ankle, you’ll be...” He stopped and sat down beside her. “Well, I was gonna say ‘fine’ but I think maybe that’s the wrong word here.” He paused for a moment before asking, “Running from, huh?”

“What?” His odd question made her turn and look at him. It broke the tension of trying to keep her emotions in check—there was no hiding the tears once she turned. There had been no hiding them earlier, really, but the trick served to loosen the knot in her throat. Clark’s eyes were full of compassion, without a hint of judgment. Why must Clark Bradens always find her at the end of her rope?

He sighed and rested his elbows on his knees, as if ready to stay a while. “My fire chief in Detroit said that when you run, it’s best to know if you’re running to or running from. He had a theory that you never got hurt running to something, you got hurt running from something.” It was an odd thing to notice at the moment, but Melba could see that rescuing was deep in Clark’s nature. The urge to help—either here or at the hospital vending machine or on the street corner yesterday—seemed to leap from him without effort. This Clark was a bit of a shock—it felt so much at odds with the careless trouble-seeker the high school Clark had been.

“From.” She pointed to her ankle, surprised to find a damp little laugh bubbling up from the tide of tears. “The theory holds.”

“That’s been my experience.” He offered a half-hearted shrug. “Done my share of ‘running from,’ too.”

Melba waited for Clark to ask her what she was running from, but he didn’t. They sat there for a moment, quiet amid the pale green of the Gordon River’s waking spring. She hadn’t even noticed before now that it was a pretty morning; her thoughts had been inwardly focused. The chief’s theory made plain and painful sense. She sighed and flexed her foot, feeling foolish. It startled her that some part of her wanted Clark to pry, to give her an excuse to blurt out the storm of questions brewing inside her. They wouldn’t surface on their own—raw and deep as the pain and uncertainty were—but they wanted to be pulled out of her. Running from. It seemed almost inevitable now that she tripped and turned her ankle.

Clark picked up a twig and began spinning it in his fingers. “You’ve got a lot chasing you.”

It was a perfectly phrased comment, opening the door for her to say more but not requiring it. The urge to tell him everything—to open up about leaving Chicago and the torture of her fading father, about disappointment and postponed travel plans and the bone-deep suspicion that she wasn’t who she thought she was—pushed at her like a sudden squall. The tears burned behind her eyes again. “Yeah.” It was a gulped whisper, a last-ditch effort to hold it all in. She nodded—twice—rather than attempt any more words.

“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.”