down for two years. Maybe she was happy to be single and wanted to see what else was out there.
I didn’t like that. At all. I didn’t like anything Shawn was pointing out.
Suddenly my forty-eight-hour shift felt too long.
The red lights flashed through the gym. We had a call. All three of us were up in an instant.
The voice of the dispatcher came over the loudspeaker. “Person down. Engine ten respond to sick person at four thirty-seven Palm Drive with medic unit six hundred seventy-four.”
We streamed out of the gym into the apparatus bay and climbed into the engine as Javier came out of the crew quarters.
“I almost got to eat a sandwich,” Javier said, getting into the front seat with the laptop.
I climbed into the driver’s seat. Shawn sat behind me next to Brandon and put on his headset. “Hey, Javier, Josh’s fucking Kristen.”
Javier paused mid–seat belt and looked at me. “Really? Isn’t she engaged?”
I turned on the ignition and the engine rumbled to life. “No. She broke up with him last night. She doesn’t want to date me though. And I’m not fucking her. I like her, asshole,” I said over my shoulder.
Shawn snorted. “Naw, she’s fucking you. Hey, man, for real though—if you’re a dick in a jar, you better not rock the boat.”
I put on my headset. “What?” I hit the button to open the bay doors and turned on the lights.
“You’re a dick in a jar. Chris Rock? ‘Break in case of emergencies.’ She had an emergency, dude,” Shawn said. “If you start getting all stage-five clinger, she’s gonna replace your ass and get a new jar.”
Brandon laughed. “I think what he’s saying is to give her space.”
Javier opened up the laptop. “Normally I’d disagree with any and everything Shawn says, but as an old married guy with two grown daughters, I have to agree with him. It’s too soon. Let things happen naturally.”
Javier looked at the laptop and got the specifics for the call. Vague. Sick person, possibly unconscious.
More bullshit.
A toothache. Drunks. So, so many drunks. Hell, this call was probably a drunk. “Sick person” was the universal code for “no idea, but probably someone shit-faced.”
I closed the bay door behind us and fired up the sirens.
Shawn didn’t drop it. “Hey, maybe she’ll get a brown jar next. I got a jar she might like.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, turning onto Victory. “They make jars that small?”
The guys laughed and Javier talked to his screen. “I met the love of my life at nineteen. Never got to play the field. Kind of wish I did. Be single. Date around in the meantime.”
“I’ve dated around,” I mumbled.
Nobody was like Kristen. Witty, beautiful. Smart. She made me laugh. I loved talking to her, loved seeing what she thought about things. Over these last few weeks, she’d become my other best friend. And dating around wasn’t an option—it was a waste of time.
We pulled up to a tired apartment complex. When we got inside, I was right. More bullshit. A lady pretending to be unconscious after a fight with her husband. She wanted him to think he’d given her a heart attack. A nice little guilt trip.
These theatrics seemed to be a relatively common affliction here. I’d gone on five calls like this since I’d gotten to California. Someone pretending to have a medical emergency to get attention. A waste of time and resources.
We didn’t get calls like this in small-town South Dakota. We got a fraction of the calls they did here, but when we did get them, they were legitimate. People didn’t call 911 unless they needed to fucking call. They didn’t use us as props for their dramas. Small-town people had pride.
I couldn’t wait to tell Kristen about this shit. She loved hearing about my calls. It was the first thing we caught up on when I would come back over after a shift. She’d have something hilarious to say for sure. Last week I’d single-handedly wrangled three drunks into the back of an ambulance, and she’d called me the Idiot Whisperer.
On the way back to the engine with the crew, I spoke low to Brandon. “How do you stay so fucking patient with these people?”
Brandon shrugged. “It’s just the job. You do your best to educate them when you can.”
“Does it work?”
“No,” Shawn said with a laugh, and Javier chuckled behind him.
I shook my head. “You know, I considered the Forest Service before the move. I’m starting to think I should have looked more