No surprise that he left it here when he moved out.
I dropped it into the trash and then grabbed a few plates. Mom’s eyes went round and then closed in pleasure when she sniffed the doughnut I held out to her. “You’re trying to make me fat, aren’t you?”
“No!” Jeez, can’t a guy do something nice without an ulterior motive?
Mom put down her cup and her doughnut and pulled out one of the iron stools at the long granite counter. “Reece, I have something to talk to you about.”
I put my own cup down with a frown. That sounded really serious. “What?”
“Um, a nice man from my book club asked me out to Sunday brunch. And I said yes.”
Sunday brunch? Lame. Probably watched too many How I Met Your Mother episodes.
Mom sat at the counter and angled her head, waiting for me to say something. She’s still pretty. The thought stabbed through my brain and circled for a moment, then tanked with a thud that made me wince. When I was little, I thought my mom was the most beautiful woman on earth. Then I got older and stopped thinking of her as anything but Mom. But sitting there in her flannel pajamas, brown hair matted on one side, standing straight up on the other, and a tiny bit of powdered sugar at the corner of her mouth, still, she was beautiful. My heart gave a painful squeeze, and words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them.
“I love you, Mom.”
Her eyes went round, then filled with love and tears. Maybe that’s why I said it. To see that reaction, to know at least someone loved me back. “Thank you, Reece, but you didn’t answer my question. Does it bother you?” The sugar decorating the corner of her mouth where she smiled only made her more beautiful to me.
I shook my head. “No.” And that was pure truth. “Go. Have fun. You deserve it, Mom.”
The little smile on her lips faded, but she nodded. “You don’t think I’m being selfish? That I’m pretending?”
I blinked at her, scratched the back of my neck. “Pretending what?”
She sipped her coffee and waved her hand. “Oh, you know. Pretending everything’s fine, everything’s normal.”
Normal. I snorted. Not exactly one of my favorite words. “Mom, I have no idea what you’re talking about. But if you want to go out on this date, you should do it, no matter what anybody else says.” Especially if anybody else was Dad.
She blew the hair out of her eyes and put down her cup. “You know this date doesn’t mean I don’t miss Matt, right?”
I dropped my doughnut back on the plate. “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She reached over and squeezed my hand. “I never blamed you. Not once, Reece.”
“I was driving, Mom. With only a permit.”
She shot up straight. “So you do think I’m pretending.”
“Again, pretending what, exactly?”
She gave me this helpless look. “That I’m over losing him.” She slid off the stool, opened another cabinet, and found a treat for Tucker. He took it happily in a single bite. “That’s what everybody thinks.”
Everybody meaning Dad. “Everybody’s wrong. Everybody can’t hear you cry at night because they’re not here. I am.”
“You are.” She pressed her fingers under her eyes for a second, then waved her hands. “Oh, Reece, I’m tired. So tired of making excuses, tired of trying to find the right balance between you and Dad. The truth is I’m glad the tension and all that anxiety is gone. I don’t want him to come home. And I want you to quit the junior squad.”
I drew in a sharp breath. I loved Mom, and there was so much I owed her, but this? I couldn’t do it. “Mom, I get it—the tension and the anxiety and stuff. But I don’t want to quit—not now. I…well, I like it.”
Mom crossed the room, picked up her cup, and tried to look cheerful. “Does that mean things are going well?” She sipped more coffee.
Shrugging, I sat beside her. “Okay, I guess. Dad tolerates me because the chief said he has to. But the juniors are great. Everybody’s been helping me catch up. And Amanda’s been giving me books to read. You know, inside tips.”
Mom’s eyebrows quirked. “Amanda. Are you two—” She waved her hand.
Hell. I hid my face behind my own coffee cup and squirmed. “No, Mom.”
“What’s she like?”
Ask me something easy, like what’s the value of pi to the sixteenth decimal. “I don’t know. She’s tough. Smart. And really misses Matt.”
“Ah. She’s the tall blond who came to Matt’s funeral. I remember.” She crumpled up the doughnut wrapper and then squeezed my hand. “Honey, I signed the permission form because—well, because I was angry. But maybe that was a mistake. Maybe you should just let this go. Your dad is…oh, you know how he is.”
I grabbed the paper ball, flicked it across the counter, and tried to swallow my disappointment. That was Mom-speak for “Don’t get your hopes up.” Maybe she was right. Dad wasn’t gonna change for her or for me. But I had to try before I—
“I’m going to get dressed,” Mom said. “Hey, could you run to the Home Depot and pick up the paint? I’ll leave the details upstairs.”
“Yeah, sure.”
She grabbed the paper ball and the empty cups and pitched them in the trash bin. Instead of heading for the door, she wrapped her arms around me and kissed my head. “Thanks for the treat, honey. I love you. Be safe.” She ruffled my hair and left the room.
I stared after her for a long moment. Then I pulled out my note and scribbled a few more lines. I carefully refolded the note and put it back in my pocket, lowered my head, and screamed inside until Tucker dropped a saliva-slimed toy in my lap.
I picked it up with two fingers, gave it a toss, watched my dog chase after it, and sighed.
I’d trade places with him in a nanosecond.
***
After Mom left for her date, I started reading one of the firefighting books Bear gave me and lost track of time. Arson investigation, or fire forensics, was seriously interesting. I used to think that fire burned up everything in its path, including evidence, but the book suggested differently. Investigators looked at things like char patterns and depth, heat shadows, the color of the smoke, and even the crowd watching a fire for clues suggesting arson. An out-of-balance fire triangle—oxygen, fuel, and heat sources—could mean arson.
Tucker leaped on the sofa, sending my books flying.
“You want to join J squad, Tucker?”
Tucker’s ears twitched, and he stared at me, big soulful eyes asking what the hell a dog had to do to get a treat around here. I scooped up the books and saw a section on fire science.
“Hey, Tucker, look.” I showed him the book he’d knocked over, and he woofed. “People earn degrees in fire science—hmm.”
That was an interesting idea.
I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to college. I’d probably study math.
If I weren’t planning to leave. But I was, so no point in making plans.
But studying math might be fun. I liked numbers. I liked asking questions that had definite answers, answers that could be unequivocally proven. Numbers were clear. Pure. Reliable and consistent, when the rest of my world was anything but.
I switched books. The next one was a collection of stories from NYFD veterans. These guys saw it all, fought it all. They had smoke headaches. Did the SCBA gear prevent those? And heart ailments—the human body was never designed to haul seventy or eighty pounds of gear up a dozen flights of steps after being in a dead sleep less than fifteen minutes earlier. I read that book cover to cover, because those guys were clear and pure and reliable, just like math. They were firefighters, and they fucking loved the job they did so much, they’d do it for free.
Volunteers. Like me.
The thought filled me up.
I wrote out a list of questions to ask the next tim
e I saw my squadmates and outlined a plan for translating everything I read into practical application. That was going to be tough. I hadn’t been near flame or smoke yet, so I had no evidence I could use to predict my behavior in those circumstances. I could mimic heavy smoke with a blindfold. But extreme heat? That one would be a challenge I could only meet with experience. Just like Amanda said—knowing and doing were two different things.
By lunchtime, I’d walked Tucker, written out a few pages of questions, closed the books, and headed out on Mom’s paint run. She wanted to update the main bathroom, take down the ancient wallpaper, and just paint the room a soothing shade of green. The paper was mostly gone, except for a few stubborn sections. I looked at the samples she’d tacked to the wall and wondered who the hell named these shades. Eel Green? No, thanks. She’d already splashed a sample patch on the bare wall. It was sage green. I took her list and her car, drove to the Home Depot, and wandered up and down the aisles while I waited for the color mixing, grabbing brushes, rollers, a tray, and some rolls of tape. I came around a corner and bam! Smacked into somebody’s cart.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t—” I started to apologize but clamped my lips together when I heard a muttered curse from a familiar voice.
“What the hell are you doing in a Home Depot?” My dad looked at me like I’d just jumped naked out of a cake or something.
I waved a hand over my cart. “Mom wants to paint the bathroom.”
He folded his arms, examining the contents of my cart. “Did you tell them it’s for a bathroom? You probably didn’t. Come on.”
Without waiting, he swung around, strode back to the paint counter, and told the kid he needed some mildew inhibitor added to paint that he was already mixing. The kid slid me a look of annoyance but grabbed some bottles. Dad grabbed more stir sticks and tossed them into my cart.
“You got rubber bands?”
What? “I don’t know. Maybe at home.”
“Put rubber bands over the can, and use them to scrape the brush.”
“Okay.” I blinked. I must have tripped on the space-time continuum and fallen into a parallel universe.
He reached into my cart and shoved stuff around. “This is the wrong roller. This is for popcorn ceilings. Stucco. You want a smoother nap.”
Oh.
He tossed the correct roller cover into the cart, threw the other into a bin of paint brushes.
“Here you go.” The guy behind the counter slid my two cans of mildew-resistant paint toward me. I hefted them back into my cart.
“Is all the wallpaper off the wall?”
I shrugged. “Most of it.”
He shook his head. “Not good enough. The walls have to be perfect. The better you prep, the better the results. Come on.”
I followed him down another aisle, where he snagged a bottle of wallpaper remover from a shelf and put it in my cart. “Oh, you need the thing with the teeth too. I don’t think we have one,” he muttered.
I froze midstep. We? He threw something called a perforating tool into the cart and followed that up with a putty knife.
“That should do it, I think.” He nodded, even managed an uncomfortable smile. “You know how to use the roller?” He picked it up and waved it in the air. “You want to make a big W on the wall, get a good spread of paint, then go back over it, fill in the spaces.”
A big W. Sure. “Makes sense.”
He stared at me—just stood in the middle of a Home Depot aisle and looked at me like someone had clubbed him over the head. Abruptly, he shook his head and said, “Well, I guess that’s it.”
“Hope so.” I took out my wallet and counted the bills Mom had left for me.
There was an eye roll. I didn’t know what that meant. “Here.” He shoved a hundred-dollar bill at me.
I wanted to crumple it up into a ball and stuff it down his throat. But I couldn’t. I’d never been able to stand up to him. I took it and slipped it into my wallet. “Thanks.”
His eyebrows went up, but he said only, “No problem.”
“Okay, well, see ya.” I headed for the cash register line and left him staring after me.
A couple of hours later, Tucker started barking the house down seconds before the doorbell rang. I was elbow-deep in scraping wallpaper. I wiped my sticky hands on a towel, jogged down the stairs to answer it, and gaped.
“Dad. What are you doing here?”
“Wondering that myself,” he muttered. “Thought I’d give you a hand with the bathroom. I did promise your mother I’d paint it but—” He trailed off, but I knew where he was going. Matt died, and the bathroom update suddenly got shuffled to the bottom of a very long list. “Problem with that?”
I snapped my mouth shut. “No, no problem. Come on up.” I headed back upstairs. “I’ve got that goop sitting on what’s left of the wallpaper.”
Dad surveyed the working site I’d arranged. On the large landing at the top of the stairs that led to all the rooms on the second floor, I’d laid out a drop cloth, the cans of paint, and all the crap he’d tossed into my cart. He lifted his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.
This was a joke; it had to be. He couldn’t stand to be near me, and suddenly, he’s buying paint, offering to redo an entire room with me? I lowered my shoulders, picked up the knife, and started scraping. I’d gotten all of the paper scraped except for the wall behind the sink and toilet.
“You made a good dent in this.” Dad nodded, and my jaw dropped again. His eyes skimmed down my torso, and I had to resist the urge to squirm. But again, he didn’t say anything. He just took the putty knife from my hand and started scraping paper from behind the toilet. We worked in silence—him scraping wallpaper into confetti, me picking up the scraps and shoving them into a trash bag. He showed me how to disconnect the sink so we could scrape the paper behind that too.
When the walls were clean and dry, I grabbed a few rolls of tape and taped covers over the fixtures. Dad grabbed the drop cloth and spread that over the floor. I pried the cover off the first can of paint and was about to dip in a brush when I remembered the rubber bands I’d left in the hall outside the room. I grabbed a few and stretched one over the can of paint the way he told me. I dipped in a brush, scraped the excess off against the rubber band, and painted a wide border at the top of a wall. Dad watched me with a flicker of…of something in his eyes.
“What?” I froze in my return trip to the paint can.
He jerked and shook his head. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to stare. Just wondering when you got so jacked.”
Jacked? Me? I glanced down at my body. My shirt was wet in spots from the wallpaper removal goop. That shit was gross. “I don’t know. I’ve been working out.” Passing out was more accurate, but I didn’t tell him that.
He didn’t say anything, just kept giving me that weird look. I painted another stripe.
“You got another brush? I’ll start this wall.”
It was my turn for a weird look. “Um, yeah, I think this was a three-pack.” I indicated the staging area. A few seconds later, he was back with his own brush. We cut in the borders on all the walls. I grabbed the paint tray and tipped some paint into the well.
“You should open the other can, mix them both. Sometimes the colors are off a bit.”
I nodded and opened the second can, catching another one of Dad’s weird looks from the corner of my eye. “What?” I asked, annoyed.
“Sorry, Peanut. Guess I’m not used to doing stuff with you without a fight or a hundred questions,” he said with half a smile.
I put the paint can down with some force. “Do you even like peanut butter cups?”
He shook his head. “Not really, why?” He tore open the plastic on the roller cover, slid it over the roller, and dipped it into the paint.
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
He stopped scraping paint off the roll
er long enough to frown. “I don’t know. Habit, I guess. It was cute when you were little.”
It wasn’t cute; it was mean. It’s always been mean. I took a deep breath and spoke my mind. “I hate it.” I used to cry whenever he called me that, but he’d laugh and say, Toughen up!
My shoulders tightened, anticipating his usual response, but it never came.
“Your grandpa? He used to call me Jackie. Fucking hated that.”
I almost dropped my paint brush. “Where the hell did he get that from?”
Dad shrugged. “I don’t know who started it. I was John Junior, so I guess they called me Jack instead of John to tell us apart. He always called me Jackie whenever I did something he thought wasn’t manly enough.”
I stared at my dad in his work boots, jeans, and T-shirt that clung to his broad shoulders and revealed the tats he had on both biceps and wondered how the hell anybody thought he wasn’t manly. My grandfather died when I was little. I didn’t remember him. I knew he was an NYFD firefighter. Died of a cancer that was probably smoke-related.
“Do you—” I broke off, silently beating myself up for kicking the sleeping bear.
“What?”
“Nothing. I just wondered if you miss him.”
Dad angled his head and dragged the roller over the W he’d painted. “Nah, not really. You probably think that’s harsh, but my old man was a harsh guy.”
Ironic much? I said nothing, just poured more paint into the tray. I snuck glances at my dad while he rolled paint onto the walls. His shoulders were tight, and there was this rhythmic twitch in his jaw.
The reason why hit me like a kick to the groin. The paint can lid slipped through my fingers and landed on the drop cloth, sticky side down. He was nervous. No, no, he was anxious—as anxious as I was. So why the hell was he here? Was that story his way of telling me he’d quit calling me candy names? Did we actually bond over something?
A dozen possibilities circled my brain, including a fume buzz, but I shook them off. I didn’t care what his reasons were; I only cared that he was here. Maybe this was a sign. Maybe he’d move back in. We hadn’t killed each other. It was a good sign.