Page 32 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

He points a fry at me. "You're a menace."

"I'm a delight. Ask anyone."

"I did. Debbie Sue says you're a menace."

"Debbie Sue loves me."

"Debbie Sue loves everybody. It's not the character reference you think it is."

I steal his pickle off his plate purely to reestablish dominance. He watches me do it and doesn't say one word, and that, right there, is more dangerous than anything he could've said.

***

Halfway through the fries, it gets quiet. Not bad quiet. The other kind.

"Ask me something," he says.

"What?"

"You want to. You've been circling it all night like a buzzard. Ask."

"Fine." I wipe my hands. "But it's truth for truth. You get one back."

"Deal."

I should ask something safe. What I ask is, "Eleven schools in twelve years. That's my number. What's yours?"

He frowns. "That's not a question, that's a confession."

"It's both. Keep up."

So, I tell him. Short version, which is the only version I do. My mama, who I loved, who fell in love the way other people fall down stairs. Every new man got a new her. New hair, new church, new town, new Nellie, dragged along behind like a suitcase. How I learned to pack a life in forty minutes. How I got good at goodbye by never letting it be a surprise.

"You leave first," he says. Quiet. Not a jab this time. Holding it up to the light.

"It's tidier."

"That what you're doing here? Being tidy?"

"You had one question, Peterson. That's three."

He holds up his hands. Fair's fair.

"Your turn," I say. "Chicago."

The table goes still. His jaw works. I watch the walls try to go up, watch him fight them, and I keep my mouth shut and my face soft, because I have sat with a hundred people right at the edge of the thing they can't say, and the only medicine for it is time and quiet.

"I lost someone," he says finally. "In a fire."

The fries sit there. The neon buzzes.

"I was working that night. Across the city." He turns his glass a slow half-circle on the table. "I couldn't get there in time."

That's it. That's all of it. And I know, the way you know a chart's got pages missing, that it's the edited version. The waiting-room version. There's a whole floor underneath that sentence he's not showing me.

I don't push. You never pull a dressing before the wound's ready. You'll take healthy tissue with it.

Instead, I put my hand over his on the table.