Page 83 of Smoke and Roses

The station generator kicks on with a growl. The lights flicker back. And at the same moment, dispatch comes over the radio. Susan’s voice is tight in a way I haven’t heard before.

“Eden Fire, Engine 1, Brush 1, all units, vegetation fire, North Fork Road at the Hollister lane, downed power line, multiple callers. Fire is wind-driven and moving east.”

I’m in my yellows before she finishes. Rob is beside me. Nate is running for the brush truck.

North Fork. The Hollister lane.

My phone vibrates in my pocket while I’m climbing into Engine 1. One text, from Lindsey, stamped 1314.

Don’t be mad. I came out to the barn first. I wanted to see our initials one more time before I called her. It’s so pretty out here. Back in an hour. Love you.

Love you.

She said it at 1314, in a text that took half an hour to find me.

The fire is between her and the road.

“Rob,” I shout. “Fuck. Rob.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Hey, Danny,” I tell a barn wall, out loud, like a crazy person, with my phone in my hand and the wind trying to take my hair off.

D.H. + L.N.

PORTLAND.

And a lopsided heart, carved with a car key by a girl who couldn’t draw.

It’s still here. The fire in September burned two hundred acres of this ranch, and blackened the ground from the ravine to the road. But it didn’t touch the barn.

Travis’s crew saved the barns. He told me that. Engine 1 had structure protection, and they saved these old barns, and so this wall is still here, with our names on it.

I put my fingers in the grooves. They’re rough and gray and smaller than I remember.

“I’m going to call you,” I whisper. “Today. I promise.”

I take a picture of the carving. Then another one, closer. Then I lean against the wall with my phone against my chest and close my eyes, and the wind howls through the gaps in the barn boards until the old barn creaks and groans like a ship.

This was not the plan.

The plan was simple. Funeral at eleven. Home by one. Couch. Phone. Call. I wrote it on a sticky note and stuck it to the dashboard, which is how I know it was a serious plan.

The funeral was for Delbert Jensen, who was ninety-one and grew the ugliest prize-winning dahlias in Weber County. His wife, LaRue, wanted white lilies on the casket and a spray of his own dahlias beside it, so at seven this morning I was in her backyard with my clippers while she stood on the porch in her bathrobe and told me which ones Del would have picked.

After the service, she caught my hand by the guest book.

“You did him proud, Lindsey.”

“He did most of it. I just cut them.”

“Sixty-two years.” Her fingers were cold and soft around mine. “And do you know what I keep thinking about? I had a list. Things I meant to tell him. I kept them for when there was time.” She laughed a little. “There’s always more time, until there isn’t. Don’t you keep a list, dear.”

I promised I wouldn’t. I hugged her. I texted Travis from the chapel parking lot that I was heading home, and I meant it.

I drove past the dam with the wind shoving the van around like a damn shopping cart, and when I got to the North Fork turnoff, my hands turned the wheel all on their own.

Okay. Not on their own. I’m thirty-four. I turned the wheel, on a red flag day, and I knew it wasn’t smart when I did it. I checked the county fire map at the stop sign first. Nothing was burning anywhere in the valley. Just wind, and blue sky, and the barn a mile and a half up the lane.