Page 21 of Second Alarm
"Evidently."
"Nice to see you."
"Mmhmm."
I stand there for a second too long. I move before she can start slicing again, because if she starts slicing while I'm watching, I'm a man watching a woman slice tomatoes, and that's a tier of observation I can't afford. I pick the bottle of wine up from the sideboard and hold it toward Mom Larsen. "I brought the pinot."
"Oh, you didn't have to do that, honey, that's too expensive."
"It's forty dollars."
"That's too expensive. I love it." She waves a hand at me. "Where are your manners, though — you didn't hug me hello."
"I apologize." I hug her. She's small. She's always been small. I've been taller than her for more than a decade and I still come in for the hug with the same instinct as when I was twenty-three, which is to bend a little, so she can reach, and when I pull back I ask, "How are you feeling."
"I'm well. I'm always well."
"How's the chemo." I keep my voice even.
"Tyler." She pulls back to look at me.
"Mom Larsen."
"I'm well."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you'll receive this evening." She pats my face a third time. "Ask me again after dinner."
"Yes, ma'am."
She releases me. I step back and look at Hanna, and Hanna is looking at her mother's hand on my face with an expression that's probably unreadable to anyone who isn't me, and is, for me, painfully legible. It says:I haven't been in this kitchen for dinner in three years. I've forgotten how much this woman loves this man. I'm unprepared.
"Calvin, set the table," Mom Larsen calls toward the living room.
"I'm watching — "
"Calvin Richard Larsen."
"Yes, ma'am," Cal shouts back.
Cal thunders into the kitchen. He stops short at the island. He looks at Hanna, who's his sister, and at me, who's his best friend, and at his mother, who's feeding all of us, and his face does the thing his face does when he's pleased with the universe, which is to split in half at the cheeks.
"My three favorite people."
"Four," Mom Larsen says, from the stove.
"Right. Dad." I say it quietly, and Cal nods.
"Set the table, please."
Cal finds the plates.
She still sets a place for her husband. I've known this since I started coming to dinner. She sets a fifth place at the end nearest the head of the table — a small plate, a fork, a napkin, a glass. She doesn't put food on the plate. She says the man doesn't need food, but he needs a seat. Cal's dad's name was Tom. Tom Larsen was a captain at Station 7, and he died in service in 2012, when Hanna was fifteen and Cal and I were nineteen and just starting to understand what this family would mean to me, and his death is part of the weather in this house. It always will be.
I carried his casket. Mom Larsen asked me to, at the memorial service at the Copper Ridge firefighter memorial park. Cal was on one corner. I was on another. Two of Tom's old crewwere on the other two. Mom Larsen said I was family, and the Larsen family didn't have enough men, and I should help.
I did. I do. I'm a Larsen-family man, which is what I've told myself for the better part of a decade, and it's the operating truth of my life, and it's why what I'm currently doing is unforgivable.
