The probie is still polishing the coupling. I walk up and I take it out of her hand and I put it back on the rack.
"Warren."
"Chief."
She saysChiefbecause they all sayChiefto me now. It still catches in me. Nineteen days of this and I have not adjusted yet. I have been Lieutenant for a year and I have been back as Deputy Chief for nineteen days and the word out of a probie's mouth still runs a half step ahead of my ears.
"Your crew is running the two-story. You're going to be in it. I'm going to watch you."
"Yes, Chief."
"You've been cleaning that coupling for twenty minutes."
"Sorry, Chief."
"Do something real. Check every SCBA on the rack. Log the pressure. If any tank is under ninety percent, you swap it. If any strap has a crack bigger than a sixteenth, you flag it. If anything on that rack isn't where it should be, you fix it before you go upstairs for chow."
"Yes, Chief."
"Don't sayyes, Chiefto me like that. Say it like you mean it."
"Yes, Chief."
"Go."
She goes. I watch her go. I watch her clear the bay. Dani is not in the corner anymore. She has gone into the ready room or upstairs or outside. She has left me the bay. That's a thing Dani does. When she has something she might say and decides not to say it, she gives you the room you're both in and goes away.
I cross to the turnout rack. I put my hand on my own coat, hung in the third slot from the end, the slot that has had my name on it for eleven years except for the year it didn't. I close my eyes.
The woman in my bed.
The lies.
Theyes, Chiefthat came out steady.
The cabin forty miles northwest.
The arrangement I have had with Val for fourteen years that I have just, in a stairwell in the last ten minutes, begun to have a second version of. A second, secret version that does not have Val's name on it. A second version that sits under the first one the way a second floor sits under a roof, holding it up, invisible from the street.
I take my hand off the coat.
I have drills coming up.
I have time to drive to a diner across the river and eat something. I have time to get a second cup of coffee. I have time to run the route home in my head, which I have now apparently started doing, which is new, the way counting my lies is new, the way the wordhomenow pointing at a cabin instead of at an apartment is new.
I walk out of the bay with my keys in my hand, and at the door I stop and I make myself put the keys back in my pocket and pick up a radio off the charger instead, because I am a deputy chief on shift and I am not going to stand in a parking lot and think about a woman in my bed while a probie is logging pressures and a chief upstairs is watching me prove her wrong.
I clip the radio to my belt.
I go back to work.
6
EVANGELINE
Iwake alone in her bed.
The light is further along than yesterday. Past noon, maybe. Rain has stopped. The cabin is very quiet in the way a forest is quiet, which is a full quiet, not an empty one. Birds. A branch scraping the eave over the bedroom window. The woodstove is low but still going, which means Max came in at some point this morning and fed it before she left. She did this without waking me. I think about her in the room, putting wood in a stove, and being that quiet about it.
