Singe (6 page)

“And what’s ailing me?” Addie demands, snatching herself and her water bottle away and going to sit at the table. Even to her own ears, her voice sounds bitchy. He probably does this all the time, casual morning afters. It’s probably not weird for him at all.

“Now there’s a question.” Eli grins at her, unruffled. Addie wonders if anything ever bothers him at all. “Easy, princess.” He crosses the kitchen and sets the Tupperware down on the table in front of her, fork and all. “Finish that,” he advises. Then, after cocking his head to the side and looking at her for a minute, he reaches out and swipes his thumb over the corner of Addie’s mouth, confident and easy. Addie’s so surprised she doesn’t move.

“You had a little sauce,” Eli informs her, licking it off before strolling right out of the kitchen.

Jerk.

Still, she eats the spaghetti.

She’s just finishing up when the alarm goes off, loud and urgent. Addie leaves the bowl on the table and jogs down to the garage to get into her turnout gear: her trousers and the silly red suspenders, her jacket and her big heavy boots. Their uniforms are made of high-tech PBI mixed with Kevlar, which won’t melt even if you pour gasoline right on it and light a match. It’s also hot as all fucking get-out.

“Triple decker on James Street,” Parker tells her, plunking his helmet on and handing Addie hers off the equipment shelf. Sharpie’s already up in the pumper, keying the address into the tablet computer they use to run the dispatch software. “Gas grill on a wooden deck, they’re saying.”

“Beautiful,” Addie mutters, hopping up onto the engine just a moment before Eli does, still shrugging into his jacket. They get a lot of calls like this in the summer months, people getting drunk and using their barbecues for the first time in a year. Temperature climbs above eighty and suddenly everyone in Western Mass is a grill master. “Just beautiful.”

It’s a quick trip over with the lights and sirens roaring, the house visible by the thick smoke pouring out the back of it. The paramedics have already arrived, which makes it the third time this week. Sharpie and Parker keep track.

“Second story, back deck,” an EMT tells Addie, shoving her red hair out of her face as she hooks her patient up to an O2 mask. She looks massively exasperated. “No grill mat, under an overhang and everything. People are wonderful.”

Behind Addie, Eli whistles softly. It takes her a minute to realize it’s not at the display of stupidity, but rather the EMT’s hugely pregnant stomach. “Congrats,” he says as they roll out the hose. “When’re you due?”

The EMT makes a face. “It’s twins, okay? Fuck, everyone thinks I’m about to pop.” Then, to her riding partner, “All right, Nick, we need to take him in.”

“How do they beat us
every
time?” Parker asks Addie as they run the supply hose from the hydrant to the pumper engine, jacking up the water pressure. Eli and Sharpie are already inside, clearing the house.

“What can I say, Parker?” Addie grins even as the sweat trickles down her backbone, arm muscles burning from manhandling the hose. She wanted to be a firefighter ever since she was four years old. “You’re fucking slow.”

They get the thing under control pretty quickly, all told, no real injuries other than smoke inhalation, and back at the house they sack out in the rec room in front of
Judge Judy
for the better part of the afternoon. Addie helps Sharpie and Gaarder chop tomatoes and peppers for panzanella. Eli and Parker take the SUV and haul a middle-schooler up out of a hole at a construction site on the far side of town. At five o’clock, Addie catches a quick shower and ducks out to her parents’ house for dinner, promising to bring back leftover cheesecake, if there is any. A lot of times there’s not.

Phillip’s car is already in the driveway when she gets there, which figures. He’s the golden child, her big brother. He’s always on time. His wife Marina’s already in the kitchen, five months pregnant, washing salad greens out of Addie’s mother’s garden. There are half a dozen aunts and uncles and cousins hanging out in the backyard, Gram holding court in a swivel chair at the picnic table. Diana herself comes up from the cellar a minute later in white slacks and a flowered blouse, two quart jars of sauce in her hands. “You’re late,” she says, then grins and drops a kiss on Addie’s cheek. “Hi.”

“Hi, Mama.” Addie plunks her purse on a kitchen chair. “Can I help with anything?”

Diana shakes her head, straightening out the collar of Addie’s T-shirt. Addie knows she recognizes Jenn’s design, but she doesn’t comment. “Stuffed shells are in the oven, cheesecakes are cooling.” Diana always makes two cheesecakes for family dinners, sometimes three if they’ve got a crowd. Phillip can put away a whole one on his own. “Why don’t you head out back? I think they’re talking about the arson.”

Addie ducks out the sliding glass door, flashing a guilty look at Marina as she goes. The Manzellas are a traditional family, church on Sundays and weddings in white, marriages sanctioned by God and women in the kitchen while the men drink beers in the living room. But Addie became a firefighter like her old man, and she’s been exempt ever since.

“Adelaide!” he calls now when she steps out onto the back deck. “We were just talking about you. Jim O’Neill said you did very well at the fire earlier this week.”

Dinner is ready in under an hour, the table set by Marina and little Paulina, who proudly shows Addie the mood ring she won in a bubble gum machine. Her teenage cousins Danielle and Kristine, Jenn’s sisters, complain loudly about their summer jobs scooping ice cream. Phillip and Marina spill the beans that the baby’s going to be a boy. Addie looks at her parents beaming, the way her brother’s got an arm around Marina. She thinks of Eli for one crazy, ridiculous second before she pushes him firmly out of her mind.

Once the table’s cleared, quiet Aunt Marianne, Jenn and the twins’ mom, slices up the cheesecake, plus vanilla ice cream for Paulina and Dante, who’s four and the baby of the family. “There you go, hon,” she murmurs, setting Addie’s cake down in front of her. Addie mutters a “thank you” in return. Marianne and all three girls moved in with Addie’s grandma after Uncle Mike died in a motorcycle accident back in the nineties, which is why Marianne didn’t have much of a leg to stand on when Gram kicked Jenn out of the house in high school. Still, Addie’s never really forgiven her for being such a enormous wimp.

“I gotta get back to work,” she tells them all a while later, kissing her parents goodbye and setting the leftover cheesecake on Gertie’s front seat. Paulina and Dante run around to the front porch to wave.

Addie isn’t going back to work though—she and Jenn have a standing post-Thursday dinner date, a tradition that’s been in place ever since Jenn first got booted out of the family. They were too young for bars then, so Addie used to scarf down her food and meet Jenn around the corner at the park. She told her parents she had an SAT study group. Addie would throw rocks and try to think of neutral topics, how homeroom was a waste of time and how gross it was that Mrs. Marchand measured their uniform skirts every day. Jenn would swing on the swings and cry.

(She made it sound like it wasn’t such a big deal, when she told Eli about Jenn being kicked out. It was, though. It was a big, terrible deal.)

But that was years and years ago, and now when Addie arrives at the bar—the divey club below her new apartment, specifically, because Jenn’s been begging to see it since she moved—Jenn is smiling and animated, waiting with a seat saved, even though the whole place is empty. “This is great,” she tells Addie, nodding at the filthy stage decked out in chili lights. “I dare you to dance on it.” Then, “Nice T-shirt, kid. I don’t know why you insist on doing that every week.”

Addie slides into her seat. “Because it makes Gram look like she swallowed a lemon, and that makes my life worth living. Plus, duh, it’s a bitchin’ shirt.”

Jenn snorts, the tiny stud in her nose catching the light; it matches the shiny diamond ring on her finger courtesy of her blonde fiancée, Liz, who’s a lawyer at a small firm in Springfield. They met in front of the bulk bins at Whole Foods. “Bitchin’, huh?”

“Yup,” Addie says confidently. It is too. Jenn has a full line of T-shirts that sell online and in boutiques all over the Berkshires, these simple/complex drawings of buildings and landscapes and human organs and robots. Addie’s favorite one has a map of all the rivers in the US. “Listen, I can only have one drink though, technically I’m on the clock right now.”

“Okay, rebel,” Jenn teases. She’s two years older, just enough that Addie thought she was the coolest person alive when they were kids. For a long time she was terrified Jenn would move to New York City or someplace, anywhere more interesting than here. Even now, in her ripped jeans and tank top, she looks way too sophisticated for a dump like Lookout—which is funny, since Jenn loves a dive bar more than anybody else Addie’s ever met.

“Anyway, I
am
a rebel,” Addie protests once they’ve ordered from the tattooed waitress. The bowl of pretzels on the table is questionable-looking to put it mildly, but she fishes out a handful anyway. “I had sex with a random dude last night, even.”

Jenn starts to laugh, then takes a look at Addie’s face and stops. “Wait, for real? Who? Where the hell did you meet him?”

Addie chews hard on her stale pretzel. She feels buzzed, even though she hasn’t had a single drink—to this day, her mom still forgets to offer her wine with dinner. “Well, okay,” she admits. “Not
entirely
random. A guy I work with, I don’t know him that well.”

“Hang on, a dude from the firehouse?” Jenn looks impressed. “Whoa. You move out and all of a sudden you’re hooking up with coworkers?” She reaches over and snags one of Addie’s pretzels, crunching it neatly between her front teeth. “You’ll be skipping church next.”

“Cowork
er
,” Addie says, ignoring the dig about church. Jenn broke up with the Holy Trinity right around the time the Manzella family broke up with her, but Addie’s faith is proving to be made of stickier stuff. “Singular. And I’m not ‘hooking up’ with him, cripes. It was a one-time thing.”

Jenn smirks. “Was it any good?”

Addie thinks of Eli’s working fingers and his thumb in
exactly
the right place, everything moving together until finally—“Yeah,” she says, taking a huge gulp of her beer as soon as it arrives. “It was good.”

Jenn’s not fooled. “
Good
good?” she asks, waggling her perfectly groomed eyebrows. She’s got a piercing there too, a tiny silver hoop. “Or good like Big Y Anthony, wearer of pleated khakis and—”

“I never said Big Y Anthony was good!” Addie makes a face. “Jesus, yes,
good
good, actually good, but it’s never going to happen again so there’s no reason to talk about it, I just wanted to use it to illustrate the point that I’m, you know, not entirely square.”

Jenn laughs. “No,” she allows, eyeing Addie speculatively across the sticky tabletop. “Not entirely.”

They catch up as fast as they can after that, racing the clock as Jenn fills Addie in on two new shops that are going to take on her T-shirts, plus her plan to alter a vintage wedding dress she found for fifty bucks on the Internet. She’s getting married at the end of the summer at Liz’s parents’ farmhouse, Jenn is. Addie’s going to be her maid of honor, not to mention probably the only one out of their whole family who’s going to turn up.

“How’re my sisters?” Jenn asks, picking at the edges of a mushy cocktail napkin.

“Oh, you know,” Addie says, then immediately feels like a jerk because Jenn
doesn’t
really. She hardly ever gets to see the twins, thanks to Marianne and their grandma, mostly just gets quick updates via Facebook. It sucks, basically. “They’re sixteen-year-old jerks, they’re fine. They’re good.” Kristine has a boy she likes, this kid Armen that Grandma hates because he isn’t Italian. Danielle’s into singing all of a sudden. Addie doesn’t like to tell Jenn that the twins hardly ask after
her
.

“Okay, get back to work,” Jenn orders once their beers are drained, picking up the check and squeezing Addie quick and tight to say goodbye. “Go save lives, et cetera. Tell your sexy fireman hello for me.”

Addie
pffts
at her across the still-empty bar, bumping open the door to the parking lot and wincing at the blast of hot, damp air. Quarter to nine and near full-dark out, and it’s still rainforest-steamy. “One-time thing!” she calls again, just before the door swings shut behind her. She smiles and unlocks her car.

Chapter Five

Eli is hanging out in the rec room when Addie turns up after dinner, drinking a Big Gulp of Dr. Pepper and playing solitaire on his phone. He looks up with interest as she clomps in, her thick braid drooping frizzily over one shoulder.

“There,” she announces to the room, plunking a Tupperware down on the edge of the foosball table. “Leftover cheesecake.” She brought cutlery from the kitchen too, the little paper plates they store above the top cupboard for fundraising events. Sharpie and Parker abandon the TV immediately.

“Oh, man, thank your mom for me, eh, Addie?” Parker says, mouth full of cake. Addie rolls her eyes, laughing, and Eli feels his muscles tense up oddly at the sound—a Pavlovian thing, maybe. She laughed at him a lot last night.

“At least
use
the plates,” she tells Sharpie, hands on her hips. So far, she hasn’t glanced in Eli’s direction once.

Addie’s mom’s cheesecake is famous enough that the whole firehouse descends on it in minutes, jostling for the biggest piece. They’re staffed at a minimum for the weekend shift, just Sharpie, Parker, Eli and Addie, plus Gaarder and Eleven’s acting captain, a guy named Rick Brooks, so it isn’t the free-for-all it could have been. At max the firehouse boasts fifteen firefighters, enough to man their two-pumper engines and a ladder truck. It’s the second biggest company in Berkshire County.