Page 87 of Honeyfires

"One more question."

"Vera."

"Who's right about the towels. Final answer. In your heart."

I closed my eyes. Outside, somewhere in the dark desert, something moved through the scrubland, going wherever it needed to go.

"Neither of us," I said. "Stevens clearly doesn't fold his at all. His are just in a pile. I saw it at the station. That's the real enemy."

She laughed warmly against my chest, and settled.

"Goodnight, Petra."

"Goodnight, baby."

She was asleep in minutes, the way she always was, and I lay awake a little longer with my hand in her hair and the desert dark outside the window, and the knowledge that Jackson was right.

This wasn't soft. This was the thing that made everything else possible.

This was my greatest strength.

She's Handled Mrs. Martinez's Feelings About Email Attachments

Chapter Sixteen

The annual station barbecue was a tradition that went back decades, long enough that the actual origin story had become mythology.

Rodriguez claimed it started as a morale initiative after a particularly brutal season in the nineties, when they'd lost a structure and come within forty feet of losing two people, and someone had decided the crew needed to eat together and drink together and remember they were still alive.

Jackson claimed it started because someone accidentally ordered twelve cases of beer instead of one, and they'd had to do something with them.

Miller, when asked, said he couldn't remember and didn't see why it mattered.

The truth was probably somewhere in the middle. What mattered in practice was that every year, before fire season hit full stride, the permanent crew and all the seasonal firefighters gathered at Station 19 with their partners and families for one last relaxed afternoon before the chaos. Food, drinks, cornhole, and that chaotic goblin-like brand of humor that emerged when you put people who regularly faced death together in a parking lot with a grill and no immediate emergency.

It was, in its way, a kind of census. You looked around at everyone who'd made it through another off-season. You noted who'd come back, who hadn't, who'd brought someone new. The seasonals came back in early spring after months away, and some of them had other jobs in the winter, some of them had been on assignment elsewhere in the country, some of them had just gone home and waited. They were a known quantity, most of them. Faces that belonged to the season, to the work, to the particular culture of a helitack station in the Arizona desert. Not family exactly, but something adjacent to it. People you trusted with your life every summer for reasons that had been established and re-established over years of shared dangerous work.

I'd been to six of these. Never brought anyone before.

Never had anyone to bring.

"You're doing the jaw thing," Vera said, as I pulled into the station lot.

"I don't have a jaw thing."

"You absolutely have a jaw thing. It goes tight right here—" she reached over and touched the hinge of my jaw with two fingers, "—when you're nervous." She tilted her head. "You're nervous."

"I'm not nervous."

"You checked the potato salad three times on the drive here."

"I wanted to make sure it wasn't going to spill."

"You checked it at a red light. It was in a sealed container. In a bag. Inside a cooler." She looked at me with enormous, fond patience. "Petra. They already love me. The cookie afternoon happened. Miller and I have a vanilla extract correspondence."

"It's different with the seasonals. This is the whole crew, all at once."

"I've handled difficult patrons, a fire crew's baking afternoon, and Mrs. Martinez's feelings about email attachments." She smoothed her red sundress, serene as a person who had never in her life encountered a room she couldn't win. "I will survive a barbecue."