Page 43 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"Stop smiling," Nellie says.

"I'm not."

I am.

Nellie points around the room. "And if any of you make one single comment—"

Debbie is already carrying my duffel to the elevator.

"One comment," Nellie says, louder, "I will let him do his own dressing changes and we'll see how that goes."

Tater has his phone out. "I'm not commenting. I'm texting."

"Tater Monroe"

"It's to my wife.”

“Who is standing right there.”

“It's efficient."

I lie in the bed with a rod in my leg and something loose behind my ribs, mortified all the way down, and underneath the mortified, so glad I could break something.

Thirteen weeks and gone. That's what she told me at the Willow Mug, like it was law. And she stood in a hospital room and rewrote it for a busted leg.

***

The cottage smells like coffee and rain got left in the walls.

Nellie sets me up in the bedroom because the couch is too low for the leg, and when I argue she says, "I sleep four hours a night in a chair anyway, sit down before you fall down," and that's the end of it. She hangs my pill schedule on the fridge. She puts a whiteboard on the kitchen wall and writes MEDS on it in block letters and underneath, smaller: DO NOT LET HIM NEGOTIATE.

"That's insulting," I say.

"That's triage."

She brings me water and the first round of pills and stands there until I take them, like I'm going to palm them, which I was considering.

"Anything hurts, you holler," she says. "Anything at all."

"I don't holler."

"Then anything hurts, you sit there and suffer quietly like a man, and I'll find out at two a.m. when your vitals go sideways." She flips the light. "Night, Peterson."

"Greer."

She stops in the doorway. Backlit. Still in my flannel.

I've got a sentence loaded. Thank you isn't big enough and everything bigger is too big, so what comes out is, "The whiteboard's insulting."

"Take it up with management." But she's smiling when she pulls the door to. I hear it in her voice.

The pills come on like weather. Slow, then all at once. The rain picks up again outside, soft on the roof, and I go down into the dark thinking that's a good sound, rain on a roof, nothing burning anywhere, nothing—

***

Smoke.

The tones drop and the rig is rolling and the radio is saying an address, saying it twice, and it's my address, it's my street, it's my building, and every man on the truck goes quiet and looks at me. The third floor is orange. The stairs are gone. Somebody's holding my coat, two men, three, and I'm screaming her name up into the smoke, I'm screaming