“Adjusting to what? You haven’t started yet.”
I push a piece of chicken around my plate. The collard greens are perfect, cooked low and slow with smoked turkey necks like Grandma Eloise taught her. Everything in this house is inherited. The recipes, the grace, the expectation that you accept what you’re given and you’re grateful and you don’t make a fuss.
“I just want to do a good job,” I say. “Wherever I end up.”
“You’ll do a wonderful job.” Mom reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “Station 24 is lucky to have you.”
Dad nods. Conversation over. The system worked. The machine produced a result and the result has a number and I should be grateful and I am grateful and I’m also sitting at this table with soapy water still under my fingernails from washing a fire engine that doesn’t belong to me at a station that won’t have me.
After dinner I do the dishes. Mom dries. We stand side by side at the sink the way we’ve done since I was tall enough to reach the faucet, and she hums a song I recognize from church, something about walking through the valley and fearingno evil, and I want to tell her everything. I want to tell her about Station 11 and the cookies and Torres and Hayes and the rig and Captain Donnelly’s face when she saw the chrome gleaming. I want to tell her about Anthem and the music and the bartender with the pink mohawk who gave me a Shirley Temple instead of letting me get drunk off my ass. I want to tell her that I’m not ungrateful, I’m just twenty-two and I know what I want and nobody will let me have it and I'm so tired of being called a kid and being treated like one.
But Mom is humming and the dishes are warm and the kitchen smells like collard greens and candle wax, and some things you don’t say out loud because saying them would change the shape of the room you’re standing in, and I’m not ready to change this room yet.
I dry my hands. Kiss her cheek. Go upstairs.
The glow-in-the-dark stars are waiting. I text Teague.
washed a fire engine today. unsupervised. possibly illegal. definitely satisfying.
She responds in two minutes.
breaking and entering a fire station is a bold move for someone who wants to work there
i didn’t break in. the door was open.
the punk community would be proud. unauthorized cleaning is a form of protest.
I laugh into my pillow so Mom doesn’t hear. Then I put on the Pretenders, quiet, through my earbuds, and I lie there and listen to Chrissie Hynde sing about going back to Ohio and I think about the bay and the chrome and Hayes saying cookiesaren’t evidence and Cap’s face doing that thing it does where nothing moves but everything shifts.
Two weeks left. The clock is running. Medina is waiting on Greystone Road and I’ve never been to Greystone Road and I’m running out of days to fix this.
But the tar is off the panel. Torres noticed. And Cap didn’t say stop coming back. She said stop washing things, which is different, and I’m learning the difference between what Captain Donnelly says and what she means.
They’re two different languages. I’m going to learn both. And then I'm going to work there and show her she made the right choice in not sending me away.
Chapter Ten
Teague
She brings reinforcements.
It’s Saturday night, which is already louder than I prefer, and Zoe walks in at nine-thirty with four girls trailing behind her like ducklings in lipgloss. They’re all her age, all dressed up, all looking around Anthem with the wide eyes of people who’ve never been in a bar that doesn’t have a cocktail menu on an iPad.
Zoe leads them to the corner table, the big one, and they pile in with their bags and their phones and their energy, and the noise level in the bar jumps by about thirty percent. One of them squeals about the pool table. Another one takes a photo of the neon sign. A third says “oh my God, it’s so authentic” in a tone that makes me want to charge a cover.
Zoe comes to the bar alone.
“Moscow mule,” she says. Then she looks back at the table. “And whatever they want. I’m buying the first round.”
“What do they want?”
“Keely wants an Aperol spritz. Mia wants a vodka soda. Jordan wants something with tequila, and Raquelle wants whatever’s fun.”
“Whatever’s fun.”
“Her words, not mine.”
I make the drinks. The Aperol spritz takes longest because I have to find the Aperol, which I keep in the back because almost nobody orders it. While I’m pouring, one of the girls comes up to the bar. Short, curly hair, loud voice.
