Page 77 of Smoke and Roses

I know she’s the best thing I’ve seen all day.

At 1800 Caleb cuts the standby crew loose, pagers on. At 1815, I take her to Marlene’s.

It isn’t fancy. Eden doesn’t have fancy. But it’s Thursday, which is pot roast, and Marlene puts us in the corner booth without asking.

Lindsey slides in across from me. I take the side facing the door and set my pager on the table next to the ketchup. The red flag warning runs till midnight. Off shift isn’t off.

“Who was it?” Lindsey asks before the water comes.

“Who was what?”

“Your ditch fire. Rob said an old man with a feed sack.” She leans in. “Old Highway? White farmhouse, green barn, his wife yelling from the porch?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s Verl Christensen.” She sits back, wide-eyed. “Oh my gosh. Verl. He buys Ardith a dozen red carnations every year on their anniversary, and every year he tells me carnations are the only flower worth the money because they last. He burns that ditch every fall like clockwork.”

“Fifty-one years, he said.”

“He would know.” She grins. “Was Ardith yelling?”

“The entire time.”

“She’s been yelling at him from that porch since they got married. It’s how they flirt.”

Marlene sets down two plates of pot roast we didn’t order and one slice of chocolate cake between them with two forks.

“Heard you saved Verl’s barn,” she says to me.

“Folsom did. I dug.”

“Well, Ardith called Betsy, and Betsy called me, and the way it’s going around, you carried Verl out of a wall of flame on your back.”

She pats my shoulder. “I’d let it stand, hon. It’s a better story.”

Lindsey is laughing into her napkin. “On your back,” she says.

“He weighs about a hundred pounds.”

“So you could have.”

“Damn right I could have.”

She eats three bites of pot roast and then just moves her potatoes around. I eat, and I wait. I’m good at waiting.

Eventually she eats every bite of her pot roast. And most of the cake.

We walk home down Main with the wind shoving at our backs. The flag at the post office is snapping on its rope. I look west out of habit, at the ridge. No glow. Just stars, and the dry grass on the hill behind the school lying flat and silver in the dark.

“You’re checking,” Lindsey says, with her hand tucked in my elbow.

“Habit.”

“Good habit.” She leans into me. “Do the damn voice for me one time and I’ll never ask again.”

“You’ll ask again.”

At the bottom of my stairs she stops and turns around and puts her cold hands inside my jacket.