Page 20 of Love Bound

We need to change the subject. Devon just moved back a month ago and now she thinks everyone has to leave home to come back. For someone who's always taken incredible physical risks, culminating in becoming a professional smokejumper, she makes sporadic leaps into Zen. The leaving-returning-finding-yourself loop is one of her mantras.

I don’t need a mantra or visualization. I need practical imaging in a machine form for my patients.

"Who's that from?" I ask, plunging a chip into her guacamole. She always adds crab meat and a squirt of lemon. It’s delicious.

"What?" she says, but sticks her hand in her sweatshirt pocket.

"I can still see the envelope."

"Nobody you need to know about," she says and turns her back to shove it deeper.

I drop it. A past boyfriend, maybe. She's had several of those. She’s a risktaker in bed too.

"Have you spoken with David?" I ask her. David was the fire chief I had to deliver a report to.

"Yes." But there’s a shrug.

"So, what’s the verdict?"

"I don’t know. We're supposed to meet in an hour," she says.

Typical David. "Well, that's interesting. I'm supposed to meet him in an hour too."

"Are you shitting me?" she asks.

***

David Keller, the fire chief, is a youngster at forty-five and though driven, dedicated, and fearless, time management is not on his list of superpowers. I think the alarm at the fire station and the need to always be on call even when he isn't, means his entire life is double-booked. His mind always operates in two places and they never overlap. So that's what he does constantly: double-book.

A beer after work with a guy in the squad and a town council meeting? No problem.

Judging at the county fair and taking his mother to a doctor's appointment? Again, no problem.

The big joke in town is always who or what he’d actually show up for.

We pull into the station outside Echo Bay proper. It’s actually the Thompson County Fire Brigade, which always makes me laugh. "Brigade" makes it sound like all they do is show up for parades and throw candy.

A guy I don’t know is hosing down the driveway. We wind our way inside the nicely decorated firehouse—a great space filled with shelving, sectional sofas, art, a huge flat-screen TV, and plants. The kitchen has three microwaves, a massive gas stove, three fridges, and exposed shelves with frost glass cabinet doors and under-counter lighting. When the T.C.F.B. hosts trainings or staging exercises, I swear the other firefighters in the state are jealous.

David rises as we come in and does his usual stammering and glancing at his watch, apparently surprised he’s scheduled us at the same time.

"It's fine," I say. "I can upload the pictures from the barn fire and print them and write up my report here. You can chat with Devon."

Devon is here for a job. The first woman in the department and he can't turn her down. It's the law now.

She tilts her head defiantly at him. "Why don’t you show me around first?"

A tall man, solidly built with the stress on built, we could see him flexing under his blue shirt just reaching for a pencil.

He smiles. "I'd rather do the interview first."

Devon cocks her head. "You know I’m the most qualified applicant. Who else do you have? Some overweight, pimple-faced kid, just out of fire school camp?"

Taking a step back, I raise a hand to cover my smile. He knows her firebrand pedigree: fast track training and then a year with the Montana smokejumpers with thirty-five jumps under her belt. Her very first day of training, she texted Laurel she had to run a mile and a half in under eleven minutes, do forty-five sit-ups, twenty-five push-ups, and seven pull-ups. It only got worse. Jumping out of airplanes into fires with a hundred pounds of gear on her would be hard to eclipse with someone who’d only shut down a controlled fire. She'd cut her teeth on the terrible wildfires that ravaged three states last year. She'd survived one jump into a tree that fell and spent three days on her own. Finally, she could deadlift double her own weight: two hundred and forty pounds.

Devon is a daredevil monster. And a chameleon. Looking at her, you'd have no idea and might guess: maybe a Pilates instructor?

She doesn't know I know about the burning tree falling with her.