Page 52 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Nellie stood behind him with her arms crossed, mouthing every word along with him like she'd written the script. She had.

Now it's Saturday evening and I'm walking down Juniper Lane on my own two feet. Sort of. One foot and one robot.

Nellie walks on my left, close enough to catch me, far enough to pretend she isn't ready to.

"You're favoring it," she says.

"It's a broken leg. Favoring it is the whole system."

"Slow down."

"You slow down."

"That's the comeback? A month in my house and that's what you learned?"

Mrs. Wasserman waves from her porch swing. Two houses down, a kid on a bike circles back twice to stare at the boot.

"Is that a robot leg?"

"Half robot," I tell him. "The knee's still original."

He rides off yelling it to another kid. Half robot. By church tomorrow it'll be the whole leg and a government experiment.

At the corner, Amos Kessler is set up in a lawn chair in his own front yard, oxygen line looped over his ears, watching the street like it's television. His niece is on the porch behind him, shelling peas into a bowl, keeping one eye on him the way family does when they've moved in to do exactly that.

He sees me and lifts two fingers off the armrest. A salute.

I lift two back.

"Butterscotch is in my shirt pocket," I say as we pass.

"Owen."

"His niece checks his sugar twice a day. I asked."

Nellie shakes her head. But she's smiling at the sidewalk, and I put that smile there, and something in me comes off its hinges, quiet, like a door lifted clean off the pin.

Here's the thing I figure out somewhere between Amos's chair and the town green. I haven't thought about Chicago in three weeks. Not the department, not the apartment, not the flight of stairs I couldn't climb fast enough. Ninety days was supposed to be a countdown.

Somewhere in that little yellow cottage it turned into a calendar.

Willowbend stopped being before. It went and became now when I wasn't watching.

***

The green is lit up like somebody dared it.

String lights zigzag between the oaks. There's a banner sagging over Main that says FOUNDERS' DAY and under it, smaller, PEACH EVERYTHING. They mean it. Peach pie, peach cobbler, peach salsa that Hank from the barbershop is defending to anyone who slows down. A band on the flatbed stage is doing violence to a George Strait song and nobody minds.

Debbie Sue finds us in four minutes flat.

"There he is." She looks at the boot. "Can you dance in that thing?"

"No."

"Can you sway?"

"Debbie."