I turn off the neon. Lock the door. Walk home.
In bed, in the dark, in the quiet apartment above the laundromat, I pick up my phone and open the conversation with Zoe. She hasn’t texted again. She’s giving me space, which is what I’m starting to realize I don’t want.
I type:the replacements have a song called “can’t hardly wait.” you should listen to it.
I stare at it. A song recommendation. That’s all it is. A song recommendation to a regular who likes discovering music. Nothing more than that. Except the song is about not being able to wait for someone anymore and Zoe will know that because Zoe knows everything, she absorbs music the way she absorbs people, completely and without defense. I like that about her.
I send it.
She responds in forty seconds. It’s almost three in the morning and she responds in forty seconds.
Z: listening now. why are you awake?
closing the bar.
Z: why are you thinking about me at 3am?
I stare at the screen. She didn’t ask if I was thinking about her. She stated it. Fact. Because Zoe Kimball doesn’t play games and doesn’t pretend and if I sent her a song at three in the morning she’s going to call it what it is.
I type three different responses and delete all of them. Then I type the truth.
I don’t know.
Z: yes you do.
I put the phone down. Close my eyes. The washing machines are quiet. The street is quiet. Zoe Kimball is awake listening to a song I sent her and she’s right. I do know.
I’m just not ready to say it yet.
Chapter Thirteen
Zoe
Saturday. Two days before I report to Station 24.
I don’t bring cookies. I don’t bring flowers. I bring myself, which is all I have left, and I walk to Station 11 one more time because I can’t not. Because even if the answer is the same, I need to stand in that bay one more time and look at that engine and breathe the diesel and soap smell of this place before I drive across the city on Monday morning and become someone else’s firefighter.
The bay doors are open. The sun is sharp and the concrete is warm and the folding chair is there, my folding chair, the one with the wobble in the left front leg. I don’t sit in it. I just stand in the bay and look around and try to memorize it. The hose hooks. The whiteboard. The tool wall. The way the light comes in through the open doors and makes the chrome on the engine glow.
Voices inside. More than usual. I can hear laughter, someone’s music playing low, the clink of dishes being washed.
Torres comes out. She sees me and stops.
“No cookies?”
“No cookies.”
She reads my face. Torres is good at reading faces. She’s been reading mine for weeks and she knows the difference between my determined face and my defeated face and whatever this face is, which is something in between.
“Come in,” she says.
I blink. “What?”
“Come inside. You’ve been standing in the bay for weeks. You can see the kitchen.”
She turns and walks inside and I follow her because what else am I going to do. The hallway is narrow, painted cream, boots lined up along one wall. Photos on the other wall, crew photos going back years. I want to stop and look at every single one but Torres is moving and I’m following and then we’re in the kitchen.
It’s bigger than I expected. Long table, eight chairs, a counter with a coffee maker and a stack of mugs. The window faces the side yard. There’s a whiteboard on the wall with a chore rotation and someone has drawn a small cartoon firefighter in the corner that I’m ninety percent sure is Torres based on the exaggerated ponytail.
