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“She named her kid Lindsey,” I say.

Her mouth opens.

“She sent you seventeen dumb birthday cards. She made her daughter paint you a sunflower. She wrote Hank back the day she got his letter, and the first thing she said was tell her everything.”

I tip her chin up. “That’s not a stranger, honey. That’s a woman who’s been waiting too.”

Lindsey stares at me. “You said, like, sixty words just now,” she says.

“I’ve been saving up.”

She grabs the front of my shirt and kisses me hard, with the spatula still in her other hand, and gets egg on my neck. It’s a great kiss.

“Tomorrow,” she says against my mouth. “I’m calling her tomorrow. I just need one more day to be brave.”

“Take as many as you need.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I keep meaning it.”

She lets go of my shirt. She looks at the shoebox on my table, then at me, and her face settles.

“Okay,” she says. “Tomorrow.”

I’m off today, but Caleb has every off-duty body sitting standby in the bay till the wind lies down. At 1340 the tones drop.

“Eden Fire, Brush 1, controlled burn escaped, 4400 North Old Highway, reporting party says it’s in the stubble and moving.”

“Who the hell is burning today?” Devin says, already pulling on his yellows.

“Somebody who doesn’t own a radio,” Caleb says. “Clint, you’re officer. Raines, Novak, Folsom. Brush 1. Go.”

It’s a quarter acre of wheat stubble behind a farmhouse on the Old Highway. An old man in overalls is beating at it with a wet feed sack while his wife shouts at him from the porch.

The flames are knee-high and running downhill toward a hay barn with the wind pushing them. It’s not a big fire. It’s the kind that becomes a big fire if nobody shows up.

Clint sizes it up from the cab and puts us to work in about four words. Nate takes the hose off the brush truck and knocks down the head before I’m even out of the cab.

Novak and I cut line with Pulaskis along the left flank, fast, clean, the way we drilled all week. I take the stretch closest to the barn. Novak takes the one closest to the road. Twelve minutes, and it’s black and smoking. Done.

The old man in overalls walks over to us with his feed sack. He’s about eighty, with a face like a sunburned walnut.

“I was burning my ditch,” he says. “Burned that ditch every fall for fifty-one years.”

“Not during a red flag warning, sir,” Nate says. Under his breath, to me, he mutters, “Jesus H. Christ.”

“What’s a red flag warning?”

“I’ll get him a pamphlet,” Novak says.

On the drive back, the wind rocks the brush truck on the Old Highway. The sky to the west is a hard, washed-out blue with no clouds in it. The cottonwoods along the river are bending. Every field we pass is dry gold grass.

“It’s going to be a long week,” Nate says, looking out his window.

He’s right. But when I get back to the station, there’s a white florist van parked across the street, and Lindsey’s standing in the bay with a box of cinnamon rolls from Marlene’s, telling Rob a story with both hands while he laughs.

She looks over when I come in, sooty to the elbows, and smiles at me across the bay like I’m the best thing she’s seen all day.