I answer when I can finally see him. “Yeah. Today, actually.”
“Happy birthday,” he says, handing me one of the poles.
“Thanks.”
He points to the small hole to feed it through before finding his own. “Do you know what you want to be when yougrow up?”
I haven’t been asked that question since kindergarten. But to be fair, I don’t know what to ask him either.
My pole snags on a section of fabric halfway through the center arch, and I bite my lip.
The last thing I need is to look incapable in front of my dad. With some aggressive wiggling, it breaks free and finds a home on the other side.
“Not really, no.” I barely think past lunch, much less years into the future.
Jack grunts. “Yeah. I guess you’d be a little young yet.”
He’s threaded three poles in the span of time it’s taken me to do one, so we work on the last one together as the tent takes shape.
“What do you do?” I ask. It’s the only question I can come up with.
“I fight fires,” he says.
“That actually sounds like something I would like,” I say. Waaay better than my dad’s job.
He circles the tent and stakes each corner into the ground. “Maybe you’d want to help me start the fire then?” he asks.
“Sure!” For the first time since we arrived, I feel excited.
I follow his lead to the west end of the campsite.
“You want dry fuel… dead branches, small sticks, fallen leaves, pine needles. Not hard to find this time of year,” he says, wiping the sweat off his forehead.
Anything he misses from that list, I pick up. Except the flat piece of driftwood. He stops when he sees it, long and smooth. It sticks up from the ground like a sign. From the lake, I guess. He tugs it from the packed dirt and tucks it under his arm instead of adding it to his pile like the rest.
With arms full, we approach an empty steel rim charred black with ash. He dumps his bundle into the hollow pit, and I toss mine on top. He pulls a matchbox from his pocket andstrikes the tip across the sandpapered side. As soon as it lights, he holds his arm toward me.
“Why don’t you do the honors.”
I reach for it. The heat of the tip singes the hair on the back of my pointer finger with the transfer. I pinch it steady and hold it in front of my eyes. The little flame on the end dances in the open air. It’s mesmerizing to watch. I let it eat away the distance, nearly touching my skin, before I let go.
“You have no fear, do you?” Jack asks. But I’m too distracted to respond. Hypnotized by the flame that nests beneath two branches. The way it creeps under sticks and spreads over pinecones. Eats clean through crumpled leaves like they never existed at all. In just a few minutes, the flicker of a flame has swelled to almost ten times its original size.
“It’s fun to look at,” he says.
I’m certain I’m staring as if I’ve never seen fire before. But that’s not it. There’s something electric about how out of control it is, nothing stopping it from doing exactly what it wants to.
“I think I could watch it all night,” I say.
“Good job on that tent.” The sound of my dad’s voice pulls me from the spell I was under.
“He made the fire too,” Jack adds.
My dad wraps his arm around my shoulders, and I feel heat spread through my body in the same way that fire is right now—inside out. Maybe having Jack here isn’t the worst part of this camping trip after all.
Present Day
I thought my worst-case scenario for this flight was being stuck in a seat next to my father. But then I met Hailey. Impossibly beautiful, endearing, and crippled with travel anxiety,Hailey. After swearing off women, I don’t know why I care so much about how she’s feeling.
