fudge sundaes. They’d send me out to McDonald’s. I bought it on autopilot. There’s a Big Mac and two cheeseburgers too. I didn’t know what you wanted.”
Her face softened, and for the first time since I’d met her, it looked unguarded, like she just now decided to like me. I must have finally tamponed my way into her good graces.
“Six sisters, huh? Younger? Older?” she asked.
“All older. My parents stopped when they finally got their boy.”
Dad said he’d cried from happiness.
“Wow. No wonder you ply menstruating women with ice cream. I bet when their periods synced they sat around glaring at you and making prison shivs.”
I snorted. “Big Mac or cheeseburger?”
“Cheeseburger. So, how’d you meet Brandon?” she asked, setting the sundae down on the coffee table and eating one of the fries.
I handed her a yellow paper-wrapped cheeseburger. “The Marines.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You were a Marine?”
“Once a Marine, always a Marine,” I said, taking the Big Mac and opening the box.
She looked me up and down. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine. Same as Brandon.”
Stuntman Mike jumped up suddenly from the couch and started barking frantically at nothing. He startled the shit out of me, but she didn’t even flinch, like this was a daily occurrence. He stared at nothing, seemed satisfied that whatever it was was gone, and then he spun a few times and lay back down. His shirt today read I MISS MY BALLS.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Twenty-four. Like Sloan.”
She was mature for her age. But then I always thought Sloan was too.
“Hmm.” I took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “You seem older.”
A sideways smile told me she liked that I thought that.
“How are you liking the new fire station?” she asked.
She must have seen the answer on my face.
“Really? It’s shitty?” She seemed surprised.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s all right.”
“What? Tell me.”
I twisted my lips. “It’s just at my old station, we didn’t get shit medical calls. I mean, we only got, like, three a day—”
“How many do you get here?”
“Twelve? Fifteen? It’s a busy station. But the calls are bullshit. Drunk homeless guys. Crap that should be a trip to a walk-in clinic. I went on a call yesterday for a stubbed toe.”
“Well, most people are pretty fucking stupid.” She ate a fry.
“My granddad used to always say, ‘Even duct tape can’t fix stupid,’” I said, putting my straw in my mouth.
“Hmm. No. But it can muffle the sound.”
I burst into laughter and almost choked on my soda. I liked her wit so much more when I wasn’t the brunt of it.
“You know, I never thought about firefighting being like that,” she said after I’d gotten hold of myself. “It’s so romanticized. Every little boy’s dream,” she said sarcastically.
I looked into my fry box. “It is not what everyone thinks it is—that’s for sure.”
I’d questioned all my life choices in the last week. So far there wasn’t much that I liked about any of it. Reduced to a probie, paying through the nose for everything, running calls to put Band-Aids on idiots. Except this was turning out to be interesting…
“Why did you move?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I had a breakup. My girlfriend of three years, Celeste. Figured a change of scenery was due. Thought I might like the busier station. And it was getting a little too much living so close to my sisters. I realized that I liked them better when I was deployed,” I said dryly.
“The breakup her idea or yours?” She unwrapped the cheeseburger and took out the pickle and ate it first. Then she dragged the bun on the paper to scrape off the onions.
“Mine,” I said.
“And why?” She took a bite.
“A lot of reasons. The biggest one being that she didn’t want to have kids. I did. It wasn’t negotiable.”
She nodded again. “That’s a big one,” she mumbled.
There were a lot of big ones at the end. I also didn’t much enjoy supporting her shopping habit or her inability to actually work in any of the many career paths she’d chosen. She was a perpetual student, jumping from one pursuit to another and never graduating. Paralegal, vet tech, dental assistant, nursing assistant, EMT—she was the most partially educated waitress in South Dakota.
“How about you? Boyfriend, right?” I asked, looking around her living room for a photo. When I’d gone to Sloan and Brandon’s to pick up tools, Sloan had photos and art and shadow boxes all over the place. Kristen didn’t have anything on her walls. Maybe