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“I bet a deer ran out in front of him,” Billy had said. “It’s happened to me.”

Anything, even a fox, had the potential to make a cautious driver lose control and end up careening down a cliff.

After she was done at school, she stopped by the café on Main Street for coffee with a group of her teacher friends.

“I’m having a donut,” Emily said. “To hell with bathing suit season.”

“I’m spending the entire summer at the beach again, so I have to be good,” first-grade teacher Marilyn said, sitting up straight. “My new bathing suit is unforgiving.”

“As usual, when in public I’ll wear board shorts and a long-sleeved swim tee,” Emily said. “Before they had such a thing, I wore cutoffs and one of Dad’s Marine Corps T-shirts. Ha! It was the one shirt that didn’t show my goat nipples.”

“Your shorts are the only ones that I know of that have actually seen a board,” Marilyn said, and they laughed, the truth being for her big-girl size, Emily was fit and athletic, her stomach flat even if she’d been eating donuts.

She told them about the all-nighter spent with her neighbor, retired Marine sergeant Billy Monroe, hosing down their houses.

“Ah, poor Billy. He’s so lonely since his wife left. I thought I might come over for a nighttime swim this weekend,” Kathy, the oldest of the group, said. At forty-eight, she was right in Billy’s desired age of forty-five to eighty. She exaggerated winking. “The last time I saw him, he really surprised me. It was the best sex I’ve had since Conrad left.”

“You said that about the maintenance man at school,” Marilyn said, laughing.

“Come, both of you. I got the pool heater fixed. Just let me know and I’ll fire it up.”

“I have to pack up the house and get ready to leave for summer at the beach, or I’d come in a minute,” Marilyn replied.

After Emily had her donut and coffee, she suddenly longed for home, her view of the mountains, her yard and garden. Her father, whom she still called colonel, had fallen in love with the place soon after she moved in, and she knew he wanted to move close by, but her mother, Alice, wouldn’t hear of it.

“Oh no, I lived on Marine bases most of my married life. I want to live whereIwant to live now. You go visit our kid if you want, but I’ll be going to Costco today.”

The worst thing about living isolated was the lack of shopping, and Alice now shopped with gusto.

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to drive up to see her,” Rob said.

“Go, go. Take all this pie.”

So the pie was wrapped up in a nineteen-fifties Tupperware pie saver that her mother had used. Colonel Porter sent his daughter a text.

I’m on my way.

“Oh shit, I have to go,” Emily said, looking at her phone. “The colonel is driving up, and you know he’ll be in back on the lawn tractor and see the scorched woods. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Look, just tell him the good thing about it is that it’s already burned. When fire season comes, you’ll be one step ahead of everyone else.”

“That’s true! Kathy, that’s why we need you. The voice of reason,” Marilyn said.

“Okay, so long. Kathy, come up later if you’re serious about seeing Billy.”

Emily leaned over and kissed Marilyn, whom she would probably not see for the rest of the summer unless there was a party at their beach house in Oceanside and she stooped to inviting her work buddies.

Emily ran into the grocery store and got provisions, lots of unhealthy things balanced with a few moderately healthy snacks. Knowing her father, he wouldn’t come empty-handed.

Since her father was half an hour behind her, she had time to straighten up the patio, get the hose tucked away and out of sight, the giant fire extinguisher he’d bought her stowed back in the garage, all signs of the fire gone, sans the blackened, scorched earth and trees at the edge of her property. Then she thought of Billy and dialed his number.

“FYI, the colonel is on his way, so mum’s the word—”

“Sweetheart, he’s going to see there was a fire the minute he turns down our road.”

“Well, minimize it if you can. As Marilyn pointed out, we’re safe now for fire season.”

“This is true,” he echoed.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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