Things You Save in a Fire(35)

Next thing I knew, the old lady—surprisingly strong—had clamped us into a group hug, and my face was in the crook of the rookie’s neck, my cheek registering some sandpapery stubble and my brain registering panic over being so close to him. The old lady held us there a minute, snuffling tears of relief and saying, “Thank you, thank you,” before grabbing both our hands and leading us to a broom closet in the kitchen.

Inside, down on the floor, was a box full of fat, squirmy puppies.

“Take some,” she said, urging us down toward them.

She wanted to give us puppies? “No thank you, ma’am,” I said. “We can’t accept—”

I was going to say “gifts,” but as I watched the rookie bend right down and pick up and cradle one of those little squirmers in his arms, I finished with “puppies.”

The rookie stood back up to show me, his face bright with good fortune. “Look at these little guys!”

“Half Chihuahua,” the old lady said, “and half poodle.” Then she tilted her head to gesture next door. “The neighbors.”

“A Poo-huahua,” the rookie said, nuzzling his face down into the puppy’s fat belly.

“Rookie,” I said, shaking my head. “No.”

“Don’t you think the station needs a mascot?”

“Shut it down, rookie,” I said, as menacingly as I could.

But he held the puppy up to me. “Look at that face.”

That was it. I drew the line at puppies. “I’m out,” I said, walking away.

When the rookie caught up with me a minute later on the front walk, I did not turn back to look. “Tell me you don’t have a puppy in your arms.”

“I don’t have a puppy in my arms,” he said from behind me, pleased with his own restraint.

“Good, because—”

“I’ve got him in a basket.”





Thirteen


I DEVELOPED A strategy for dealing with Diana: one-word answers only.

It turned out, I was right all along. She didn’t just want me to help her with groceries and stairs. She wanted to hang out. She wanted to be friends.

She wanted forgiveness.

She claimed she was just glad to have me around, but her actions made it clear that she wanted more. Wherever I was, she’d show up there. If I tried to read a book in the living room, she’d read a magazine in the living room. If I was making a snack in the kitchen, she’d make a pot of tea. If I took a stroll down to the rock jetty, she would coincidentally be in the mood for a stroll of her own.

She was companionable. She was low-key. But she failed to comprehend something important: I didn’t want to be her friend.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

In the years after she left, I built my entire life on a foundation of routine and order and low drama. That meant setting schedules and keeping to them. It meant going to the same place and eating the same things and following the same routines over and over. It also meant doing everything in a careful, controlled, regimented way.

And that was before I’d even moved here. Now I’d turned everything inside out. I had ten times more chaos than I could handle. The last thing I needed was to hash out old disappointments with a woman I’d already given up on.

I was here to be helpful, and pleasant, and do my duty. I was not here to play Bananagrams, or to learn the art of crochet, or to bare my soul. To anybody.

But Diana didn’t get it.

“Answer a question for me,” she said one night as I tried to escape after dinner to practice a little parkour.

“Busy,” I said, at the door.

“You’re always busy.”

“Sorry.”

“There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

I just shrugged and gestured toward the road. “Working out.”

The house was so tiny that those nighttime escapes had become a kind of salvation. I’d jog the narrow streets of the jetty and then on into town and around the coast, vaulting, leaping, climbing, and swinging. It did make it feel like the whole town was a playground.

Usually, by the time I got home, Diana was fast asleep with her white noise machine running. But on this night, she waited up. When I walked back in, she was perched in the living room like a spider.

“Come talk to me for a minute,” she said.

“I’m not really a big talker,” I said.

“You used to be.”

“I used to be a lot of things.”

I sat down, as requested, but I chose the chair closest to the stairs, and I perched at the edge, ready for my quick getaway. As I sat, she studied me. “I want something from you,” she said.

I met her eyes. “What?”

“I want you to forgive me.”

Well, that was blunt. “We don’t always get what we want.”

“I don’t want you to do it for me. I want you to do it for you.”

I drew in a long breath. “We’re not going to be friends, Diana.”

“This isn’t about being friends.”

“Kinda seems like it is.”

She frowned at me. “I’d like to be your friend, I would. I can’t deny it. In addition to loving you—I’ve always just really, really liked you. So I’m not going to pretend like I feel the same way about you that I would about some stranger off the street. But that’s not what I mean when I say I want you to forgive me.”