She hasn't forgotten. Dani does not forget porches or summers or the year I finished the porch, because Dani helped me frame two of the joists in a weekend in 2019 when I was still learning to drive a nail with my off hand. She has not forgotten. She has chosen to sound like she forgot.
"I need to run drills tonight with your crew,” I say.
"Yeah. I heard."
“You need anything else?” I ask her.
She looks at me. She looks at me in a way that is neither good nor bad. It is the look Dani has when she has something she might say and is choosing not to say it yet.
"Nothing else," Dani says. "Go eat."
"Okay."
“Max?”
"Yeah."
"You'd tell me if anything was off?”
"Nothing's off."
"Okay."
"Okay."
I walk past her.
I walk past the engine and the probie and the turnout racks and out the bay door into the yard and around to the side of the building where the fence comes close to the wall and the smokers stand. I don't smoke. I haven't smoked since I was twenty-four. I stand in the small sliver of shade where the smokers stand and I put my back against the brick and I look up at the square of sky over the station roof.
Evangeline Clark is in my bed.
The sentence comes at me whole. I have been pushing it down with one hand for an hour and the hand has gotten tired. She is in my bed. She is in a flannel shirt of mine that will smell like her by tonight. She is in a kitchen I have cooked in alone for nine years and she has washed a bowl and a spoon in the sink. She put her wedding ring in a white dish on the dresser. I watched her take the ring off. I watched her take the ring off and I stood in the doorway with my hands at my sides and I did not move because if I had moved I would have crossed the room to her.
I am thinking about crossing the room and taking her in my arms.
I have been thinking about crossing the room since I laid her on the quilt at three in the morning. I have been thinking about it through an oatmeal breakfast and a mug of coffee and a conversation about Millard and a conversation about the propane and a conversation about the landline. I have been thinking about crossing the room the whole time I was telling her things she needed to hear in order to be safe. I am thinking about it now, with my back against the brick and my lies to Val still warm on my mouth.
I have not touched her. Evangeline.
I am not going to touch her. Not today. Not tomorrow. Probably not ever.
But, I want to.
She is sleeping off smoke inhalation in a bed that has nothing in it but her own body and a quilt. She has buried a husband in her head in the last eight hours. I am a woman who carried her out of a house on fire and I am a woman who set the house on fire and I am the last person she can afford to have touch her. I know what I am and I know what I am not going to do.
I think about crossing the room anyway.
I think about fucking her. Having her come apart beneath me.
The animal part, the one that made a sound in the third-floor hallway when I saw her under the window, is not gone. It was not burned off in the carry. It was not washed off at my kitchen sink. It is lower in me now. It has put its head down and closed its eyes, and it knows where the bed is, and it is waiting.
I push off the wall.
Drills. Four minutes on the two-story. A crew that has gone soft on live burns. A probie who is going to get somebody killed in six months if I don't ride her on the coupling routine. A chief upstairs who noticed my head wasn't where it needed to be andtold me to prove her wrong. A woman forty miles northwest of here in my flannel shirt who I want to fuck.
I have work to do.
I go back in through the bay.
