Page 12 of Burning for the Mountain Man

I'm crying in a fire station apartment over a man I've known for three weeks

Owen:

that's more like it. gonna call you in five minutes. pick up.

Setting the phone on the nightstand, I pull his shirt from the doorknob. Press it to my face. Breathe in.

Wood smoke. Just wood smoke. And underneath it, the faintest trace of something else. Something that smells like staying.

CHAPTER FIVE

NASH

Four days.

Four days of Chief Deveraux and Ms. Blake. Morning briefings where she sits at the opposite end of the table with her tablet, her data, her professional distance. We discuss defensible space compliance like two people who haven't seen each other naked on a mountaintop. She references fire ecology. I reference incident response. Bobby sits between us eating donuts, texting Maria under the table, and looking like a man watching a car crash in slow motion.

On day two, Torres called in a brush fire on the east side of town. Small. Quarter acre, dead grass near a propane tank. We rolled Truck 1, knocked it down in forty minutes. She was there before us, already marking the ignition point for her report. Professional. Competent. Wouldn't look at me.

My cabin feels wrong. The second pillow still has her dent. The mug she used is clean in the cabinet because I washed it at midnight on night one, then stood in my kitchen staring at it for ten minutes trying to figure out why I washed it instead of throwing it at the wall.

My father's place is a twenty-minute drive up the ridge. Same cabin he's lived in since before I was born. Same porch. Same coffee mug from 1994 that he holds with both hands like it's the last artifact of a life that made sense.

"You look terrible," he says when I drop into the chair next to him.

"Thanks."

"You sleeping?"

"No."

He drinks his coffee. The mountains do their thing. Copper turning to purple, shadows pooling in the drainages below. Somewhere on the other side of this ridge, Autumn Blake is probably reviewing fuel load data in an apartment I can hear through the station walls.

"Met someone," I say.

My father's eyebrows don't move. He's been retired from the Forest Service for eight years, and his facial expressions retired about two years before that. "The state coordinator."

"Bobby told Maria. Maria told the post office. Post office told you."

"Patty Cole told me. Tuesday at the general store." He sips. "Said you were smiling. Figured it was either a woman or a head injury."

"She's leaving. Rotation notice came through. November third, Hawthorne District."

"And you did what?"

"Told her she was already looking at the exit."

He sets down the mug. The disappointment on his face is quiet, earned. This is a man who watched his own wife pack a car because he chose the department over everything else, and he's looking at his son making the same damn mistake from the other direction.

"Nash."

"I know."

"Do you?" He leans forward, elbows on his knees. The sun catches the gray in his hair. "Your mother left because I gave her a reason to. Worked every holiday. Missed every anniversary. Made the job my whole identity. So when she said she was going, I stood in that doorway and let her walk because I didn't know how to give her a reason to stay."

My jaw tightens. He's never talked about Mom this directly. The leaving was always a fact in our house, never a lesson.

"You giving this girl a reason to stay?" He picks up his mug again. "Or you giving her a reason to go?"