Fire at Sunset: The Firefighters of Darling Bay 4 (14 page)

“I know you don’t remember. It was a feeling, that’s why.”
 

“I’m not a robot. And
you’re
one to talk. You don’t tell anyone anything. You’re lecturing
me
about being honest?”
 

“Oh, honey,” he said, his voice low and rough, rocks on gravel. “I’m always honest. You think those things I said last night weren’t true?”
 

He’d called her gorgeous, intoxicating, sexy as hell, and then, this morning, he’d called her
love
. “I—I don’t know.”
 

“How do you feel about me?”

Only one word pulsed in her brain, but it was out of reach of her mouth. “I…think you’re…super fun.” Good grief.
 

“I was falling in love with you.”
 

Was.
 

Caz continued. “But you can’t even admit you like me.”
 

“Isn’t it
obvious?
” What she’d done last night, the way she’d kissed him—did she really have to attach words to that?
 

“Nope. Use your words, Mad. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me something I want to know.” There was something under his voice, a wish that Bonnie could hear, could almost feel, as if he’d held it out to her to take. His voice softened. “Come on, Mad.”
 

She opened her mouth.
 

The words didn’t come.
 

Bonnie could almost see him lose his patience. He’d held onto it, and just like that, he let it go.
 

No. More than that. He let
her
go. She could see it—she wanted to stop it, but it would be like holding back the tide that rushed up every night, drowning the legs of the Darling Bay pier.
 

“I’m going to go next door and check on my father.”
 

Bonnie scooted backward until her back was pressed against the headboard. Her voice was small. “I’ll wait here.”
 

Caz’s voice was soft. “Nah. That’s okay.”
 

Shock knifed her. “But—”

His hand moved slightly as if he were going to try to touch her, but he was still feet away and he made no effort to get closer. “Bonnie—it’s probably better this way.”
 

What way? What
way
was he talking about? Leaving her naked in his bed? Alone? “You’re kicking me out?”
 

“No. You can stay as long as you want.”
 

But he wasn’t coming back to bed, to her. He was going to check on his father, and then he’d stay with him. In the other house. She could see that.
 

Caz open the door. He gave one glance over his shoulder. His eyes were ravaged. Had she done that? Just by making a joke? But inside, she knew it was bigger than that. He’d asked for her honesty. Truth. It was what mattered most to him—that she be able to tell him how she felt.
 

And then she hadn’t. She couldn’t.

The door shut softly behind him.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kicked out. She’d been kicked
out
.
 

She’d had sex with Caz, a man she hadn’t even planned on liking. She’d actively
dis
liked him, in fact. Where had that gone? When had she become the bad guy?
 

And then he’d kicked her all the way out of his house.
 

Somewhere, this must have been covered in Miss Manners, wasn’t it? Dear Miss Manners, A man made love to me six ways to Sunday and then, in the morning, he asked me to go home. Should I be offended? Thank you, Confused in Darling Bay

Answer: Dear CIDB, You raise an interesting point. But it sounds like there’s something you left out, so in this letter I’ll leave out the answer and see how you like it.

Dang.
 

Bonnie locked her bike to the rack she’d insisted her mother install outside Darling Trinkets. The rack was steel painted gold, shaped in the form of a bicycle. Only her mother could find a twee bike rack.
 

The shop bell tinkled overhead as she entered, and she heard her mother call, “I’ll be right with you! Just dusting a few crystal bowls!” That was code for taking off her flip-flops and slipping on her pretty-but-not-comfortable heels she wore in the store. She thought people (especially older men with money who liked anything Civil War era or older) preferred her to look old-school feminine. Bonnie had seen the way men put cash on the counter for whatever she told them might (or might not have) come from a tobacco plantation in Virginia, and thought her mother might be right about her theory.
 

“It’s just me,” Bonnie called. “Just your daughter.”
 

“
Just
my daughter?” Marge came around the corner, one flip-flop on, the other foot barefoot, her arms open. “What could be better?”
 

Her mother hugged her tight.
 

That was normal. That’s what her mother did.
 

What Bonnie did wasn’t normal.
 

She burst into tears.
 

An hour later, she’d managed to stem the waterworks to an occasional sniffle. She hadn’t been able to tell her mother what had happened. Bonnie and her mother didn’t talk about sex, and they
certainly
didn’t talk about what happened afterward. Marge didn’t even ask, and for that Bonnie was grateful. She couldn’t have put it into words. (What would she say? She joked about being a virgin and that’s what brought this all on? She knew that wasn’t it. She knew in her heart that she’d blown it with Caz by not showing him
herself.
Maybe that part of her was broken. And the fact that she’d lost him—something she’d thought wouldn’t matter at all—hurt so deeply, she wondered if she’d pulled something internally. Somewhere near her heart.)
 

But her mother knew—in the way her mother had always known—exactly what she needed. She tucked Bonnie up in the back of the shop, behind the huge walnut desk, in Bonnie’s favorite deep chair. She wrapped her in an afghan that smelled faintly of mothballs and the cinnamon candles that sat in a box nearby. She put a glass of water near her, and a placed the latest
People
magazine on her lap.

The bell jingled and Marge started to slip off her flip-flops to put on her heels. “Oh, honey. Do you want me to go put up the closed sign? I will.”
 

“No, go. Go. I’m fine.”
 

“Oh, Bonnie. My bright shining star.” Her mother smiled at her, and Bonnie had a sudden, vivid memory of the day Gramma had died. Bonnie, at almost eighteen, had been inconsolable. It was her first loss, her first experience with death.
 

Bonnie had been the one to find her. She’d gotten up early, as she usually did, and she’d made them tea. It had been their tradition, all through Bonnie’s high school years. Bonnie’s mother liked to sleep in, getting up and racing through a shower only an hour before she had to open the store at ten. But Gramma Honor, since she’d moved into the back room after a bad fall, had taught Bonnie what was fun about getting up early. Tea, for one. Gramma Honor would hold the cup in her hands, breathing in the steam. Then she’d sip and say, “Can you feel it? The caffeine? Wait for it. I know you hate waking up early, but here it comes. Burns cleaner than a coffee rush. Just you wait, my bright shining star of a granddaughter.”
 

Then Gramma Honor and Bonnie would make bets about what Bonnie’s father would forget when he left the house (always something—a hat, his wallet, his keys), and her grandmother almost always won the bets and loved crowing about it even more than winning the nickels Bonnie had to fork over out of her allowance. Her grandmother made getting up early into something exciting and fun, every day.
 

That terrible morning, there had been no warning. Of course, Bonnie had thought about losing her grandmother at some point in the future, but it wasn’t a real thing to worry about. It wouldn’t—it
couldn’t
—happen for years and years, not until Bonnie was old enough to know how to handle it. Gramma Honor was strong, anyway. Besides that fall and the broken clavicle that went with it, her health couldn’t have been better. She had the blood pressure of a forty-year-old and the cholesterol of a runner.
 

So there had been nothing to prepare Bonnie for opening her grandmother’s door, tray in hand, to find nothing in Gramma’s bed but the shell of the person she’d loved.
 

Bonnie had dropped the tray, breaking both tea cups, burning her feet with the scalding liquid.
 

She’d known.
 

Funny, she’d hadn’t exactly known
what
she’d known. If she’d been asked, she wouldn’t have said Gramma Honor was dead. But she knew the woman she loved wasn’t in that room.
 

Without remembering moving, she’d found herself in her mother’s darkened bedroom. “Mom. Mama, wake up.” She hadn’t called her mother that since she was eight and broke her arm in a fall off her rollerblades. “Mama, come.”
 

In her grandmother’s room, Bonnie’s mother had touched Honor’s cheek, felt her cold skin.

“What do we do?” whispered Bonnie. There had to be something to do.
 

Marge sighed and sat on the edge of the bed, keeping one hand on Gramma Honor’s lower leg. “Nothing, honey.”
 

“CPR.”
 

“I don’t think so.”
 

“No, we have to
try
.” Bonnie pushed past her mother’s legs and started tugging on her grandmother’s shoulders. “We learned it in P.E. We have to get her on the floor.”
 

“Bonnie.” Her mother tried to still Bonnie’s hands.
 

“We have to
do
something.”

“Honey.” Her mother’s voice broke. “She’s gone. She’s cold. Look, her hands are still. We can’t—we can’t get her back.”
 

“But there’s nothing
wrong
with her.” There wasn’t, except that she wasn’t breathing. Gramma was healthy. On her old ten-speed, just last year, at eighty-seven, Bonnie’s grandmother had almost managed to pass her on the way the strawberry stand. “She’s healthy. There’s nothing
wrong
with her.”
 

There was, though. There was one thing wrong. Her grandmother had left the room. Without Bonnie, without asking permission, without saying goodbye, Gramma Honor had left her.
 

Bonnie had felt her eyes fill with tears. “No.”
 

“Don’t cry,” said her mother.

Don’t
cry
? When there was nothing else to do? Anger had filled Bonnie. “If I’d gotten up earlier, I could have
saved
her. It’s my fault.”
 

Her mother had grabbed her then, hard, pulling her to her chest in a hug so tight Bonnie lost her breath. “Don’t you ever say that again. It’s not your fault. Do
not
say that again. You were the brightest part of her life. She called you her star for a reason. You’re the brightest part of
my
life. Keep being that, my love. Keep shining bright. No tears, just be strong. I need you now.”
 

Her mother said that over and over that terrible week.
I need you now.
Bonnie, at almost-eighteen, had taken her job seriously. She hadn’t gone to school, even though it meant missing the last week of her senior year. While everyone else ditched school to go to the senior picnic, Bonnie had been working with the funeral home. While her friends took the long school bus ride to grad night at Disneyland, Bonnie had been ordering the flowers, putting the obituary in the paper. Under her watchful gaze, her mother fell apart. Her father made it his full-time job to take care of her mother, leaving everything else to Bonnie.
 

And she’d risen to the occasion. The only time she’d felt completely helpless was at the funeral itself, when she’d gotten up to say a few words. There, in front of the microphone, she’d only said, “My grandmother—” before her voice clogged with tears. She couldn’t speak around them. She’d felt nothing but helplessness and anger. Her father had walked up the few steps to the podium to help her, but Bonnie had stubbornly shaken her head until she could swallow hard enough to finally push back the tears. Then she’d been able to speak about Gramma Honor.
 

Her mother was right. It was better not to cry. It was better to push the feelings back. Keep them under a layer of stubbornness. And if you told yourself something hard enough a hundred times over and then a thousand more (
I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine
), you started to believe it.
 

Now, tucked into the chair at the store, watching her mother help a tourist decide between penguin and kitten salt shakers, she was glad she’d learned that early. The pain rose again, sinking into her skin like broken glass sank into her bike tires.
 

Caz.

Somewhere in the last three months
,
during the code-three runs to asthma attacks and code-two runs for pizza and ice cream, during his silences and his surprised barks of laughter, under his watchful eyes that warmed when he didn’t know it, she’d been falling in love.

Love.
 

She’d honestly thought those afternoons when her stomach wouldn’t settle, when her insides wouldn’t stop flipping around like a dying fish, that she was becoming lactose intolerant. She gave up milk in her coffee, cheese for her burgers, and even went a whole week without ice cream.
 

Then she’d had him, and lost him, and only after he was gone did she realize what her sickness was.
 

Love.
 

What a stupid thing for a person, perfectly reasonable in every other way, to feel.
 

Her mother finished with the customer, and tottered back to her chair,
ploomp-
ing down and kicking off her heels. She patted her blond curls into place. Then she faced Bonnie, her eyes kind. For the first time, Bonnie could see Gramma Honor in her mother’s gaze. When had her mother developed those lines across her forehead? When had she gotten those deep laugh lines at her mouth?