Page 22 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

“You looked like you'd wandered away from a Girl Scout troop and got lost in a national forest.”

Annie swats him with a dish towel without looking. “She looked wonderful. She looked like she'd worked hard all day, which she had.”

“That was your first summer?” Beck's still looking at the photo.

“First one. I was terrified the whole time. Pretended I wasn't.”

“She threw up on day two,” Reid offers.

“That's not — okay, that happened once.”

Beck huffs something close to a laugh but doesn't say anything else. He just looks at the picture longer than the joke really requires, like he's doing the math on how many summers of photos are on the refrigerator, how many of them have my face in them, growing up one Sunday dinner at a time.

Dinner rolls on loud and a little chaotic, like usual. Someone reaches across someone else for the rolls. Annie tells Reid to stop leaning his chair back before he cracks his skull on her tile. Nolan tries to defend his rope-swing technique one more time and gets shut down by three separate people simultaneously.

Russ turns his attention to Beck. “How long you figure you'll keep jumping?”

“As long as they'll let me,” Beck says, easy, like it's not even a question worth considering twice.

“Rough on the body, from what I hear.”

“It is. Worth it, though.”

Russ asks him something about static line procedures, and Beck answers without hesitation, the kind of detail that only comes from doing something for years. He doesn't stop being easygoing, but his answers get more careful, more exact, the way people talk about things they take seriously. He talks about judgment calls and crew responsibility the way some people talk about things they'd defend with their life, because he probably has. I watch him field Russ's questions and think, not for the first time, that there's a difference between knowing someone does something dangerous for a living and seeing what that means to him.

After dinner, cleanup happens in the usual sprawl. Someone washing, someone drying, someone deliberately avoiding both. I end up next to Annie at the sink, drying dishes she hands me faster than I can keep up.

“Last summer here, isn't it,” she says, not quite a question.

“I'm not gone yet.”

“Good,” she says. “I haven't trained anyone else to make the salad.”

I laugh, and she lets it go at that. I'm grateful, because I don't have an answer ready for anything bigger than a dish towel and a joke about salad.

Later, drying my hands, I look out at the room. Beck's standing near the door with Reid and Russ, listening to something Russ is saying, taking a container of leftovers Annie's pressed on him despite his protests he really doesn't need that much potato salad. He looks like someone who belongs in this house, in this noise, in this friendly chaos. That's a strange thing to notice about a person I've known only in pieces for a few years.

As we're gathering by the door, Annie catches Beck on his way out. “See you next Sunday.”

Not you're welcome anytime or stop by if you're still around. Instead treating him like he’s a permanent member of the regular crew.

Beck pauses. Just barely. Easy to miss if I wasn’t looking right at him. “Yeah,” he says. “See you next Sunday.”

The drive back to the crew house is quiet, windows down, the day catching up with everyone. By the time we're back, the weekend is dissolving into Monday. Someone checks gear on the porch. Someone heads straight for the shower. Nolan disappears upstairs, still muttering about the rope swing.

I encounter Beck in the common room, going through his pack.

“Big day tomorrow,” I say. “You ready to see how the other half of the forestry crew works?”

He looks up. “How bad can it be?”

I consider him for a second. “You'll be begging for a fire by Wednesday.”

six

Beck

The tree is bigger than it looked from a distance. It came down sometime in the last storm, judging by the still-green needles. It's taken out enough of the trail corridor that we'll be here a while.