Page 10 of Tangled Up with the Firefighter

No order form. No coffee. No lemon scone, no errand, no task. He’s not in turnout gear and he’s not in his station tee. He’s just Dean, standing in my doorway in a T-shirt with his hands at his sides and nothing to offer me except the fact that he came.

“I’m not here because you need something,” he says.

I set the eucalyptus down. My hands are shaking.

“I’m not here because something’s broken or because there’s a drain to check or because Lea told me you skipped lunch.” He takes one step inside. The bell settles behind him. “I’m not here because it’s what I do.”

“Dean.”

“I’m here because I can’t stay away from you. Not because staying away would be irresponsible or unkind. Because it hurts.” Another step. He’s at the counter now, and his hands are still empty, and his voice is low and raw in a way I’ve never heard from him. “Everybody in my life needs me to show up. My mom, my sisters, the crew. I show up. I handle it. And I’ve never minded because that’s who I am. But I’m not showing up for you because of who I am. I’m showing up because of who you are.”

My hands are gripping the edge of the workbench. My eyes are burning.

“You’re not on my list, Laurelle. You were never on my list.” He reaches across the counter, and his hand covers mine, and he uncurls my fingers from the wood one at a time. Gently. Like he’s handling something he knows is fragile. “You’re the reason I want to come home.”

I look at his hands around mine. Empty, open, holding nothing except me. Not fixing anything. Not managing a task. Not being reliable or steady or useful. Just here, in my shop, because it hurts to be anywhere else.

That’s the difference. Duty has a task. Devotion just shows up.

I come around the counter. He meets me halfway. His arms close around me, and I press my face into his chest and I stop holding it together—all of it, the wall and the fear and the pattern I’ve been running from since my grandmother stopped calling. He holds me, and I let him, and this time, I know it’s not because he can’t stop taking care of things.

It’s because he chose me. Just me. With nothing in his hands.

After a while, he pulls back and looks at me, thumbs on my cheeks, and says, “Call her.”

He doesn’t say who. He doesn’t have to. I told him about my grandmother in this same shop, standing at this same workbench, and he remembered because he remembers everything.

“She might not answer,” I say.

“Call her anyway.”

EPILOGUE

DEAN: 5 YEARS LATER

The bell rings at 6:15, and Laurelle looks up from the workbench with dirt on her hands and a stem of something purple between her fingers.

“You’re early,” she says.

“Shift ended early.”

I lock the door behind me and flip the sign. The courtyard is empty, the other shops already dark. Through the back window, I can see the greenhouse she added last spring, the glass fogged with humidity, rows of seedlings on the shelves she asked me to build. I built them twice because the first set wasn’t level enough.

Our daughter is with my mother tonight. Karen drove up this morning and took Leilani to the resort pool, and when I called to check in, she told me to stop calling and go find my wife.

The shop looks different than it did five years ago…and exactly the same. More inventory, better lighting, a second cooler she bought with the resort contract money. A framed photo of Leilani and Laurelle’s grandmother is tucked by the register, taken last Christmas in Raleigh. But the bones are the same. The stone walls, the buckets along the floor, the workbench where she was standing the first time I walked in here holding an order form and trying to remember how to talk to a woman.

On the workbench next to her elbow is a finished arrangement in a glass vase. Purple and white, trailing greenery. The station flowers. Five years of weekly deliveries, and the crew still acts surprised every Monday. Like they’ve never seen wildflowers before.

“That one’s not done,” she says, nodding at the vase. “The eucalyptus is wrong.”

“It looks fine.”

“It’s not fine. It’s unbalanced.”

She wipes her hands on her apron and reaches for the vase. I come around the counter and catch her wrist.

“Leave it.”