Page 51 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I laugh. It's real. That's the strange part I keep bumping into all evening, how real all of it stays. The chicken comes out right. He carves it because I hate carving. His glasses slide down his nose over the cutting board and he pushes them up with his knuckle, the same push, ten times a night, and my chest does the same warm stupid thing it always does.

Nothing is different. He is exactly himself.

I watch him butter a slice of bread edge to edge, careful as a man painting a fence, and I set my fork down.

"How was your morning?"

I give it to him easy. Wide open door. All he has to do is walk through it.

"Quiet." He reaches for the honey. "Slow, even. Council packet, two contracts, one phone call about a fence line that has been the same fence line since 1987." He glances up. "Yours?"

There it is. The whole morning, offered up, and no dark-haired woman in it. No silver car. No palm against his cheek in a gravel lot in front of God and the barber pole.

Not a lie. I want to be fair, and fair matters, so I hold it to the light. He didn't say nothing happened. He said quiet, and maybe to him it was. Men don't narrate their mornings. Ask Tater what he did all day and you'll get "worked," and Debbie Sue's been married to him eleven years.

It's not a lie.

It's an omission. And I file omissions.

"Quiet too," I say, and smile, and pass him the honey before he asks.

He tells me about the fence-line man. He does the voice. I laugh in the right places, and mean the laughing, and that's the part I couldn't explain to a single soul on this earth, how both things sit at my table at once. The best man I've ever known, buttering bread in my kitchen. And a thirty-second reel of gravel and silver playing behind my eyes on a loop.

After, he washes and I dry, hip to hip at my little sink. He hums something without knowing he's doing it. He kisses my hair at the door, tells me the chicken beat the Mug's by a mile but I can't tell June, and drives home under a sky full of stars, a happy man with nothing in the world to hide.

I stand on the porch and listen to his taillights fade.

The oak at the corner of the yard is a black shape against blacker sky. No wind in it tonight. No bird. It's a tree, and I'm a grown woman, and I don't say one word to either of us.

Here is what I know, and it fits on an index card. A woman I've never seen. A hug too long for strangers. A hand on his face like it had been there before. A car nobody around here drives. A man watching it out of sight with an expression I've never earned.

And a quiet morning.

That's all. That's the entire file. Thin as an envelope. I've opened files on less and closed them by Friday, innocent as church. Most likely this one closes too. A cousin. A colleague. Some old Abilene something. Willowbend is small but the world isn't, and a man is allowed a morning I don't have the notes on.

I'm not going to ask him. Asking only gets you what a person chooses to tell you.

I'm not going to tell anyone. Not Millie, God forbid, not Debbie Sue, not the porch, not the tree. This is how I work. It's how I've always worked. My eyes gather, and my gut sorts, and the file sits in the drawer until the evidence walks in on its own two feet or never does.

I go inside. I lock the door. I put James's jelly-jar flowers in the center of the table where I'll see them at breakfast, because they're beautiful, and because he picked them, and because both of those things are evidence too.

My filing system has never once lost anything.

That's the trouble with it.

Chapter fifteen

Stop Wasting Them

OWEN

The boot weighs four pounds and it is the best thing I have ever worn.

Dr. Osei frowned at my X-rays for a long minute this morning like they'd insulted him personally. "You heal like a man with somewhere to be."

"I do have somewhere to be."

"The cast comes off. The boot goes on. Weight as tolerated." He pointed a pen at me. "Tolerated does not mean ignored, Mr. Peterson."