Allie Pleiter - Falling for the Fireman

“I’m sorry,” she conceded, shooting up a quick prayer to God for a bigger helping of grace this morning. “It’s just that, while I’m all for safety, you know you can be a bit of a glass-half-empty kind of guy sometimes.” All the time, she silently added.

“You think I’m the kind of person who’d pull over Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve if I saw a taillight out.”

“If I believed in Santa. And that sleighs had taillights.”

He squared his stance at her. “It’s my job to be careful. I take it very seriously, and you should be glad that I do. Here’s the last of the forms you need to file for the occupancy permit. You can have Nick bring them over when he comes this afternoon to…start his job.” He said that final part with an air of endurance.

Even though the answer was clear on his face, Jeannie asked, “What do you think of George’s scheme?”

“I think George means well.” He swallowed the rest of this thought, she could tell.

“But…”

“But only time will tell if it’s a good idea. If it helps.”

Nicky just needed something to do, something to take care of—no one thought of this as some kind of home-remedy therapy. Of course it would help. “He’ll love it. Plug needs it as much as Nicky. More, actually.”

“He’s a fat dog, I’ll grant you that. As for the rest of it…” She didn’t like the look in his eyes as he let the sentence hang in the air unfinished. He handed her the papers she needed for the adjuster and turned to go. You’d better let me in on what You’re doing here, Lord, she prayed as Chad closed the door, because I can’t see how Nicky and Chad will ever get along.

George looked up from the hose he was inspecting, making Chad realize he’d let the firehouse door slam harder than necessary. “So,” George said with a smirk, “how are things at the Big Rock Candy Mountain?” As last night’s dog-walking proposition had proven, George kept his hands in every aspect of Gordon Falls’s community life. He kept his nose in the lives of each and every one of his volunteer firefighters, too. The younger firefighters loved George. His grandfatherly personality was half the reason Gordon Falls hosted a volunteer fire corps. People would do anything to help the guy.

“I think you’re nuts with this dog thing.”

“But you’ll go along with it, right?”

Chad would do anything to help George—except climb a ladder again, although he’d been known to pitch in during extraordinary circumstances. George never questioned Chad’s decision to “chain himself to a desk,” even though he disagreed with the choice. They had too many mutual secrets not to defend each other. Chad was one of the few people who knew the now-widowed George even had a son. Clark had been a colleague of Chad’s back during his early firefighting days, but the Bradens men hadn’t spoken to each other in almost ten years. Stubborn as oxen, the pair of them. Despite the fact that Clark had somehow managed to refer Chad to this position here in Gordon Falls, Chad never could get either man to divulge the source of the wedge between them. He and George understood each other’s private wounds, respected them and had developed a father-son relationship of their own.

“That place is going to be a riot of color. And loud.” Chad set down the clipboard he’d taken over to Jeannie’s, pausing to scratch Plug. “Jeannie Nelworth is optimistic to a fault.”

“What a surprise,” George grunted as he wrestled the massive section of hose onto its shelf. “Still, everything’s in order?”

“Yes.” Chad finished with Plug and stepped over the dog to help George work another section into stiff coils. George was well past the age other fire chiefs retired. He ought to be sitting at the diner arguing with Gordon Falls’s other grandpas, fishing on the river and populating church spaghetti dinners, not coiling hoses. Still, stubborn old George refused to even consider the notion of stepping down.

“That’s not a very convincing yes.”

“She needs to be more cautious. That’s an old building and she’s gonna have mobs of kids in there every afternoon.”

George pushed his ever-present baseball hat back on his head, showing his balding mop of now-more-white-than-red hair. “This is a woman who’s just survived a fire, Chad. You of all people know what that does to a person. Go easy. I have no doubt she’ll go the extra mile so all those cute little tykes can stay safe buying their bubblegum. She’s just raw right now, and she needs to move forward to feel better. Take a little extra care walking her through the process, will you?”

Chad scowled. Extra care was George’s department, not his. It was George who stuffed himself into the firehouse’s Santa suit for every Christmas party, George who’d found Plug as a stray puppy and took him in despite serving no clear use short of good company. Which begged the question he’d been wanting to ask George since yesterday: “So why draft me into overseeing Nick as Plug’s official dog walker?”

“Your sunny disposition, of course.”

With a whistle Plug would ignore, George walked out of the equipment bay into the firehouse kitchen to pull open the refrigerator. “You can relate to the boy, I think. He needs watching. And you? You’ve been gloomier than usual. I know October’s coming, but…”

“Don’t.” Chad hated it when George got it into his head to play armchair shrink.

The old chief sighed. “It’s been eight years, Chad. That’s too long to play hermit, don’t you think?” George pulled out a brown glass bottle of root beer and snapped its cap against the bottle opener mounted nearby.

Chad moved in front of him. “So I need a thirteen-year-old? To supervise? This is a bit off the mark, even for you.”

“You’re just like Nick. You need something other than your losses to care about. And goldfish are lame.”

“George…”

Ignoring his challenge, George took a healthy swig followed by a satisfied sigh, then gazed out the kitchen window onto Tyler Street. “He’s a great kid, but he’s been through too much. The way I see it, you know something about holding up that kind of weight. And since you won’t go full-time back onto an engine, you’ve got too much free time.”

George could be exasperating when he hatched a plan, but Chad knew better than to argue with him. He didn’t care one bit for the orchestrating look in George’s eye as they stood in silence for a moment, staring across Tyler Street to Jeannie’s shop. A pair of work lights strung from the high ceilings of Jeannie’s shop gleamed out through the front windows on either side of the boarded-up doorway like yellow eyes over a square wood nose. Her yellow polka-dotted Jeep was still out front, but the blue insurance van had driven off. Jeannie was probably still in there, cooing to the woodwork with visions of sugarplums dancing in her head.

“I don’t want to do this, George.”

“Well, I suppose I can’t make you, either.”

Oh, I suspect you can. “She bothers me. You should see the colors she’s gonna paint that place. It’ll be like working across the street from a life-size game of Candy Land.”

“It will, won’t it?” George chuckled. “It’ll be nice to see that building full of life again, don’t you think? My dad used to take me over to that store for root-beer floats when I was Nick’s age. Best treat in the world. Not like all the sugar water they call soda pop now.” George’s beefy hand came down onto Chad’s shoulder. “Don’t be the guy to stop Jeannie Nelworth from reopening her candy store for the holidays. It’d be giving the Grinch a run for his money.”

“She’s got to be careful.”

“She’ll be careful, Chad. She’s got more reason to be careful than all of us put together with what she’s been through. I’m kind of proud of her, actually, getting back into the swing of things so quick and taking on such a big project like this. She’s got spirit, that woman. Can’t knock Jeannie Nelworth down for long.”