Page 55 of Smoke and Roses

“Then you’ll have to start over.”

I roll onto my back and pull her with me, so she’s sprawled across my chest with her hair in my face. She smells like roses and green stems and me.

“Tomorrow,” I say. “From one.”

“Promise?”

“I’m thorough.”

She laughs into my neck. Then she reaches down and pulls her grandmother’s quilt up over both of us, all the way to my chin, and tucks it like she’s tucking in a kid.

“Every inch,” she whispers.

I close my eyes and smile into her hair. It’s going on a hat.

Chapter Eighteen

The pickup is on its roof against the guardrail above the river on Ogden Canyon Road with its wheels in the air.

It’s a Saturday morning in early October, cold and bright, and the maples in the canyon have turned red and orange.

A tourist in a rental car called it in. One vehicle, rollover, driver trapped. We get there in eleven minutes, Engine 1 and Rescue 1 and the ambulance, and the first thing in view when I come around the back of the rescue is a sweat-stained cowboy hat in the middle of the road. Then an arm hanging out of the driver’s window.

The fingers are moving. That’s good.

“Raines, Mathews, you’re on extrication,” Caleb says. “Folsom, Novak, scene safety and traffic. Wallace, you’ve got patient.”

“Copy.”

Devin and I hit the rescue compartments at the same time. Cribbing. Step chocks. The spreader and the cutter. Neither of us has to talk about it. He’s on the passenger side stabilizing before I’ve got the driver’s side blocked, and when I look up, he’s already looking at me, waiting for the nod.

I nod. He nods back.

The driver is an old rancher named Lyle Sorensen, seventy-four, on his way to Ogden with a load of firewood that is now scattered across two hundred feet of canyon. He’s hanging upside down by his seat belt with blood running out of his hairline, and he’s furious.

“Damn deer,” he keeps saying. “Damn deer just stood there.”

Rob crawls in through the back window to get c-spine. “Lyle, you hurt anywhere besides your head?”

“My pride. My truck. My firewood.” Lyle tries to turn his head. Rob stops him. “Is that the Army fella out there? The one going with Lindsey North?”

I stop with the cutter in my hands.

“Yes, sir,” Rob says, holding Lyle’s head steady. “That’s him.”

“Huh.” Lyle squints at me upside down through the window. “You treat her right, son. Her grandma used to give my wife peonies every Mother’s Day. For free.”

“Yes, sir,” I say.

“Can we get him out of the damn truck,” Devin says from the other side, “before we finish the town meeting?”

We get him out. Pop the door, cut the B-post, lay the side open. Rob holds his neck, Devin and I slide the backboard in, and the three of us bring him out of that truck without jarring him an inch. The ambulance takes him down the canyon still cussing about the deer.

We stand on the shoulder in the October sun, surrounded by firewood.

“That was clean,” Devin says.

“It was.”