Page 26 of Second Alarm
"Drive safe."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And honey." She tilts her head.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Next time she does the dishes," Mom Larsen says slowly, like she's laying down a card, "let her do them herself."
I don't say anything.
She pats my face one more time — the fifth — and she goes back inside and closes the door, and I stand on her porch for a full minute in the yellow bird wreath's shadow, and it lands on me, the way things do when you've been avoiding them long enough — I'm already caught, and at least one person in this house knows it, and I don't know yet whether she's going to save me or let me burn.
Chapter 5
Hanna
The Watershed is what happens when a man retires from the fire service and decides to open a bar, and then turns out to have been, all along, the exact right kind of person to own a bar. Big Jim Kowalski got his payout at fifty-five, bought the old corner lot on Main from a family that had been selling hardware on it for a hundred years, and built a bar that looks like a hardware store where they decided to start serving beer and forgot to remodel. The shelves behind the counter are lined with Mason jars. The walls are hung with vintage Copper Ridge Fire Department photographs and one framed thing that's definitely a fish. The tables are solid wood. The stools are upholstered in what appears to be a repurposed saddle.
I've been avoiding it for weeks.
I'm here now because Cal told me that if I didn't come to the Station 7 happy hour on a Friday night like a normal, socially adjusted human being, he was going to drive to my mother's house, put me in the passenger seat, and bring me himself, and I believed him. Cal, once a year, makes a threat he's going to follow through on, and it's almost never predictable which one it's going to be, so you learn to honor them all.
I walk in at seven-twelve. Gemma is at the bar with Beck. Aiden is in a booth with a woman I haven't met, who must be Riley, because Cal told me Riley has very specific eyebrows and the woman at this booth does. Derek is already loud. Deluca is drinking something neon. Rivera is at the jukebox making a face at the jukebox, and the face is translated, by my developing Rivera-to-English dictionary, assomebody has put on Bruno Mars and I've accepted this.
Ty is at the end of the bar. Ty is talking to Big Jim. Ty isn't looking at me.
Ty has been not-looking-at-me with forensic precision for four weeks. At shift, at calls, in the kitchen, in the briefing room, in the parking lot. He's a man who's mastered the art of not-looking-at-a-person. He looks at me, technically, exactly the amount a colleague would look at a colleague, and not a tenth of a percent more, and I hate him for it, because it's humiliating to want a person to look at you and to have no mechanism by which to tell them to stop respecting the distance you yourself asked them to respect.
"Larsen!" Derek bellows, from the middle of the bar. "You made it."
"I made it."
"I had five to one odds you wouldn't make it."
"Who did you have them with."
"Myself."
"That's not how odds work, Derek."
"It's how I do odds."
"That's not how anybody does odds."
Rivera, from the jukebox, doesn't turn around. "She's right. Shut up. She's right."
Derek shuts up. I've been at this station for four weeks, and I've learned that Rivera's voice from across a room is theauthority of last resort, and nobody argues with Rivera. I'm going to request a Rivera for my apartment when I get one.
Big Jim comes down the bar to me. He's a big man. He's also, Cal has told me, a soft man. I've known Big Jim most of my life in the way you know someone who's in the background of your family's community — a man who was at my father's funeral, and stood at the back, didn't give a speech, but made the green bean casserole that showed up at our door every week for four months after, delivered by his teenage son, who's now the Derek currently trying to bet on my feelings.
"Hanna Larsen." Big Jim sets both hands on the bar.
"Mr. Kowalski."
"Jim."
"Jim."
