Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,71
“Because you come from a long line of brave heroes. Because the captain knows your dad. Because you are fun and friendly and easy to get along with. Because you look like a firefighter—like a Norman Rockwell painting of a firefighter, actually, crossed with a GQ cover. And because the captain doesn’t think women should be in the fire service.”
“He can’t think that.”
“He does. He told my old captain, back in Austin. They only took me because they were desperate.”
“That was before he’d seen you in action. There’s no way he still thinks that now.”
“Wanna bet?”
“He knows you’re good. He knows you’re better than half the guys in there.”
“Half of them?” I said. “All of them.”
“You could dead-lift Case under the table.”
“Anybody could dead-lift Case under the table.”
“You deserve that job,” Owen said.
“I do,” I agreed. “But you’re the one who’s going to get it.”
Twenty-one
A FEW DAYS later, just before dawn, the stalker threw a brick through my mother’s kitchen window.
That really happened.
It was a shift morning. Still dark out. My alarm hadn’t even gone off yet. The shattering sound woke me up, and I sprinted down two flights of stairs in my bare feet only to stop short at the kitchen threshold when I saw glass pieces glittering all over the counter and the floor.
Diana was right behind me.
The sound of it had been shockingly loud. So loud, in fact, that it woke Josie next door. She showed up in her robe not long after, after I’d found some flip-flops and started sweeping up the mess. Diana watched from the doorway, and Josie watched from the back door.
My mom’s kitchen window, in her historic little home, had not been safety glass. I found razor-sharp shards in every nook and cranny, even one impaled in a loaf of banana bread on the far counter. I swept three times, dry-mopped twice, and then wet-mopped, and I’m sure it took me a while, but I don’t remember time passing. Anger, I think, burned away all sense of time from that memory—and all details other than the way my hands started aching from their death-clamp on the broom handle.
Only when I’d gone over every surface did I let Diana and Josie step in.
“I don’t think it’s ever been this clean in here,” Diana said.
“It was my stalker,” I said, pointing at the brick on the counter.
Josie peered over. “At this hour?” She frowned.
Diana chimed in. “Who has that kind of energy?”
It was appalling. And incomprehensible.
Josie decided to make coffee—checking the inside of the pot for glass shards first. “How much anger does this guy have to get up before dawn to go terrorize somebody?”
“Nothing gets me up before eight,” Diana said, lifting up the brick to get a look. Then she added, “Other than terrorism.”
“Careful,” I said.
“There’s a note,” Diana said, turning it over. Sure enough, there was a note rubber-banded around it.
I just stood there, staring. Did I want to read it? I wasn’t sure. Of course, that’s what he wanted us to do—and part of me didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of scaring us more than he already had. What if we ignored him? What if we refused to be terrorized?
I wasn’t sure of the best course of action.
Finally, Diana made the decision for me. She pulled off the rubber band, unfolded the note, and read it out loud. “It says, ‘Just quit you wore.’” She looked up, frowning. “You wore what? What did you wear?”
Josie leaned over to take a look. “I think he means ‘whore.’”
“Oh!” Diana said, checking the note again. “He forgot the H!”
“Not a great speller,” I said.
“Not great at punctuation, either,” Josie said, holding it up as evidence. “There should be a comma after ‘quit.’”
“And probably an exclamation point at the end,” Diana said. “For emphasis.”
Josie took another look at it. “Not going to win any prizes for penmanship, either. That T looks just like an X.”
And then Diana and Josie started laughing, that odd, minor-key laughing that you do sometimes when things are the opposite of funny. But laughing all the same.
“So,” Diana said, still laughing. “Not an English teacher.”
“Or a calligrapher,” Josie added.
“Or a preschool graduate.”
They were cracking themselves up. They had decided to think it was funny. Which I admired.
But I didn’t think anything about this was funny. And it was time for me to go. Past time. I was going to be late for work. For real this time.
* * *
“YOU’RE LATE, HANWELL,” Captain Murphy said, when I showed up